The Black Dagger Brotherhood_An Insider's Guide

by J. R. Ward

  When he removes his hand the blade is brilliant orange, and he lays it down on the anvil. Picking up the hammer, he strikes the hot metal over and over again, the clanging sound ringing in my ears.

  Vishous hits the nascent blade with his glowing hand again and then repeats the banging. After a while he thrusts the metal slice back into the sand and finishes his cigarette.

  While he stabs out the hand-rolled, I feel as though I’m intruding and also not getting the job I came to do done. As the silence continues, I think of all the questions I could ask him, like . . . how does he feel about Jane being a ghost? Is he worried that he can’t have children? How are things with his mother? What’s it like for him to be committed to one person in particular? Does he miss his BDSM lifestyle? Or is he still practicing it with Jane? And what about Butch? Has their relationship changed?

  Only thing is, I know that the answers would not be forthcoming, and the silences that follow each inquiry would be deeper and deeper.

  I watch him work the blade, alternating the heat and the pounding, until he’s evidently satisfied and puts the dagger on the oak table. I wonder for a moment if now isn’t when the interview will really start . . . except he just stands up and goes to some smaller lengths of metal rodding that are in the corner. He’s going to start another blade, I realize.

  I leave his workshop to the sound of the hiss as his hand comes into contact with metal. I go more slowly than I came, maybe because I’m hoping he’ll have a change of heart and come after me and at least . . . well, what would he do? Nothing really. A union between the two of us is my aspiration, not his inclination.

  As I meander along, the empty mug and wrinkled napkin in my hand, I find myself truly and honestly depressed. Relationships require effort, sure. But you need to have one in the first place in order to work on them. V and I have never clicked, and I’m beginning to realize we never will. And it’s not that I don’t like him. Far from it.

  To me, V is like diamond. You can be impressed and captivated by him and want to stare at him for hours, but he will never reach out and welcome you. As with him, a diamond exists not to be shiny and sparkly or because of who bought it to put on someone’s hand—those functions are simply by-products of the results of the incredible pressure inflicted upon its molecules. All that brilliance comes from its—and his—hardness.

  And both will also be around long after all of us are gone.

  Lover Unbound

  The People:

  Vishous

  Dr. Jane Whitcomb

  Phury

  John Matthew

  Wrath and Beth

  Butch and Marissa

  Zsadist and Bella

  Cormia

  The Directrix

  Amalya (who becomes the new Directrix of the Chosen)

  Layla

  Qhuinn

  Blaylock

  Rehvenge

  Xhex

  Dr. Manny Manello

  The Scribe Virgin

  Payne

  The Bloodletter

  Grodht, solider in the war camp

  Places of Interest (all in Caldwell, NY, unless otherwise specified):

  St. Francis Hospital

  Brotherhood mansion, undisclosed location

  The Tomb

  ZeroSum (corner of Trade and Tenth streets)

  Jane’s condo

  The Commodore

  The Other Side (the Chosen’s Sanctuary)

  Summary:

  Vishous, son of the Scribe Virgin, falls in love with Dr. Jane Whitcomb, the human surgeon who saves his life after he is shot by a lesser.

  Craft comments:

  God, where to start.

  Vishous was, hands down, the single worst writing experience of my life. Getting his story on paper was a miserable exercise in torture and was the first and thus far only time I have ever thought to myself, I don’t want to go to work.

  The whys are complicated, and I’ll share three of them.

  First of all, each of the Brothers is a separate entity in my head, and they’ve all had their own way of expressing themselves and their story: Wrath is very dictatorial, very blunt, and I have to race to keep up with him. Rhage is always a cutup—even when the serious parts come rolling through, there’s a goofy sidebar going on. Zsadist is reserved and suspicious and chilly, but we’ve always gotten along. Butch is a total party—with a lot of sex talk thrown in.

  V? Vishous is and has always been—and excuse me for being blunt—a prick. A self-contained, defensive prick who doesn’t like me.

  Putting his story on the page was a nightmare. Every single word was a struggle, particularly when it came to his first draft—most of the time I felt as if I were having to pry the sentences from bedrock using a kiddie hammer and a salad fork.

  See, for me, drafting is really a two-part enterprise. The pictures that I have in my head guide the story, but I also need to hear and smell and sense what’s going on while I’m doing the writing. What this usually means is that I step into the shitkickers of the Brothers or the stillies of their shellans and go through the scenes as if I were living the events through whoever’s POV I’m in. To do this, I play the scenes backward and forward, like you would a DVD, and just record, record, record on the page until I feel as though I’ve captured as much as I can.

  Vishous gave me next to nothing to work with, because I couldn’t get behind his eyes at all. The scenes that were in POVs other than his were fine, but his? Nothing doing. I could watch, but only from afar—and as a lot of the book is from his perspective, I felt like banging my head against the keyboard.

  Look . . . yes, this is fiction. Yes, it’s all in my mind. Except, believe it or not, if I can’t get into a POV deeply, I feel like I’m making stuff up—and that isn’t a happy place. Honestly, I’m not that bright—I’m not going to get it right if I just guess. I have to be inside a person to do things right, and having the V-door slammed in my face was the root of most of my misery.

  Things did break eventually, though. More on that in a little bit.

  The second reason Lover Unbound was a hard book to write was that there was content in it that made me nervous, because I wasn’t sure whether the market would bear it. Two things in particular worried me: Bisexuality and BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadomasochism) are topics that not everyone is comfortable with even in terms of subplots, much less when they involve the hero of a book. But that wasn’t the full extent of it. In addition, V had been partially castrated and had forcibly taken a male after he’d won his first fight in the war camp.

  The thing was, V’s complex sexual nature colored a lot of his life—including his relationships with Butch and Jane. In order to show him properly, I felt like I had to present all sides of him.

  In the first draft of Lover Unbound, I played things so conservatively that the book was flat. I went very light on the bondage scene with him and Jane right before he lets her go, and I didn’t put anything about him and Butch in at all.

  In the process, I totally violated my own rule number two (Write Out Loud). And, big surprise, the result was something that was about as appealing as a dead sunfish on a summer dock—nothing moved and it stank. I stewed and hemmed and hawed for a week or so, just tinkering with scenes involving John Matthew and Phury. In my heart I knew I had to jump off the cliff and stretch some boundaries, but I was exhausted and uninspired from the effort of trying unsuccessfully to drag V’s POV out of him.

  Talking to my editor was what got me off my ass and back in the game. She and I discussed the things that were weighing on me, and she was like, “Go for it—just get it all in there and let’s see how it plays out on the page.”

  She was, as usual, right. In fact, the message she gave me that day was the message she’s always given me since way back in the Dark Lover era: “Push it all the way, go as far as you can, and we can evaluate later.”

  When I went back into the manuscript, I was one hundred percent committed to balls-to-the-walling it—an
d was surprised that there were really only three scenes that I markedly changed. Two were with Butch and V, with the newer content beginning on pages 209 and 369 respectively, and then I added the scene with V in the war camp that starts on page 287.

  The rest of the alterations or additions were relatively minor, but changed the tone of the Butch/V interactions entirely—proving that a little goes a long way. Take, for example, the opening pages of chapter thirteen (p. 135). Butch and V are in bed together, and V is healing Butch after the cop did his business with a lesser. If you read through the second, third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs of my first draft, you’ll note that V is admitting to himself he needs soothing in the form of another warm body next to his. It’s not Butch’s body specifically, however, and there is no mention of anything sexual. It’s purely a comfort thing:

  . . . With the visit from his mother and the shooting, he craved the closeness of another, needed to feel arms that returned his embrace. He had to have the beat of a heart against his own.

  He spent so much time keeping his hand away from others, keeping himself apart from others. To let down his guard with the one person he truly trusted made his eyes sting.

  —LOVER UNBOUND, p. 135

  What I added in the second draft were these two paragraphs:

  As Butch stretched out on Vishous’s bed, V was ashamed to admit it, but he’d spent a lot of days wondering what this would be like. Feel like. Smell like. Now that it was reality, he was glad he had to concentrate on healing Butch. Otherwise he had a feeling it would be too intense and he’d have to pull away. [p. 135]

  Butch shifted, his legs brushing against V’s through the blankets. With a stab of guilt, V recalled the times he’d imagined himself with Butch, imagined the two of them lying as they were now, imagined them . . . well, healing wasn’t the half of it. [p. 136]

  Much more honest about what was really going on. Much better. Could have gone even farther, but it was enough—so much so that it required me to add the few sentences that followed, to clarify for the reader that Jane was the object of V’s desire now.

  That’s the thing with writing. Books to me are like ships on oceanic courses. Small, incremental changes can have huge effects in their ultimate trajectory and destination. And the only way to get it right is to constantly reread and double-check and make sure that what’s on the page takes the reader where they have to go. Once I made those changes (there were a number of other places where I did a little tinkering—including, for example, the dagger scene in the beginning of the book where Butch lifts V’s chin up with the weapon Vishous just made for him), the writing in V’s POV got much easier.

  Bottom line? I look at the whole mess as yet another example of rule number eight at work: Once I was more true to what was in my head, the writing block was lifted.

  As for the scene from the war camp where V loses his virginity by taking another male? Man, I just wasn’t sure how people would view him after that one. The thing was, he wasn’t given a choice, and it was the standard of the camp: In hand-to-hand combat practice, losers were sexually dominated by winners. The key, I decided, was to show as much context as possible—and to depict V’s internal commitment after it was over that he would never do it again.

  After my editor read the new material, I was relieved when she said that it worked for her, but I remained concerned what the overall reader reaction was going to be. For me as an author, reader response is something that weighs on me, but in a curious way. It’s in my mind because unless people buy the books I write, I’m out of a job. But the thing is, I can’t write to please readers, because I truly don’t have much control over my stories. The best I can do, as I’ve said, is always be mindful and respectful and thoughtful with the challenging content. I suppose I kind of live by the motto, It’s not what you do, but how you do it.

  Funny, though. Little did I know that the negative reaction about V’s book would concern something else entirely.

  Which brings us to Jane.

  The third reason the book was so agonizing to write was because I got Jane wrong on the first pass. I’ll admit, I was so concerned with V that although I had plenty of scenes with Jane in the initial draft, the dynamic between the two of them was relatively lifeless. The problem was, I interpreted Jane as a cold scientist. What happened, then, was that there were two chilly, reserved people interacting, and that is about as much fun to write/read about as an ingredient list on a soup can.

  My editor figured it out, though. Jane was a healer, not a white lab coat. She was a warm, caring, compassionate woman who was more than just a repository for medical knowledge and know-how. On the second trip through the park with the manuscript, I tapped into Jane’s core, and the relationship between her and V started to sing, reflecting more what was in my head.

  On a side note, one of the first scenes that I saw for V and Jane hit me way back when I was writing Lover Awakened in 2005. I was running at the time, and this vision of V standing in front of a stove, stirring hot chocolate, suddenly came to me. I watched as he poured what was in the pan into a mug and handed it to a woman who knew he was going to leave her. Then I saw her standing at the window of her kitchen, looking out at V, who was outside in the shadows cast by a street lamp.

  That, of course, became the good-bye that starts on page 322 of their book.

  When the scenes from the Brothers come to me, they do not arrive in chronological order. For instance, visuals of Tohr and where he ultimately ends up hit me before Wellsie even died on the page. So, in the case of the hot-chocolate exchange for Lover Unbound, I was stuck wondering how in the hell Jane and V were going to end up together. The thing was, I knew she was a human, and I wanted for them what the others had, namely a good seven or eight centuries of mating. But with Jane not being a vampire, I had no clue how that was going to happen—plus I knew she got shot, because I’d seen V’s visions and knew what they meant, even if he didn’t. . . .

  When I outlined Lover Unbound, I just kept wondering how the two of them were going to have an HEA, and I was really worried. What if there wasn’t one at all? But then I got to the end . . . and saw Jane standing in V’s doorway as a ghost.

  I was actually relieved and thrilled. I was like, Oh, this is great! They get the long time frame!

  Unfortunately, some readers didn’t see it that way, and part of that I blame on myself.

  Usually when I get to the end of a book, I feel that although I wish I could refine the line-by-line writing even more (I’m never satisfied), I’m confident that the scenes themselves and the way the plotlines flow is rock-solid. I’m also fairly certain that I’ve given sufficient context and grounding for the reader so that they can see where things started, what happened, and how everything ended up.

  For me, I was so relieved about Jane and V’s future (with her life-span issue being resolved), that I took for granted readers would feel the same way. My mistake was that I underestimated the challenge to romantic convention with her being a ghost, and I was unaware that it would be a problem to the extent it was for some. I’ve been over and over the disconnect in my mind (the one between the market and my internal radar screen) and have decided that part of it is my background in reading horror and fantasy—because the resolution worked within the world and provided the hero and heroine with a solution, I just assumed it was okay.

  Except here’s the thing: Even if I had realized it was going to be a problem for certain folks, I wouldn’t have changed the ending, because anything else would have been a copout and a lie. I don’t write to the market and never have—the stories in my head are in charge, and even I don’t get to see what I want to happen in the world occur. That being said, if I were writing the book again, I’d put in another ten pages or so at the end with V and Jane interacting to show the happiness they both felt—so readers were superclear that in the couple’s minds things ended up just fine.

  The way I view it? This series has pushed a lot of boundaries, pushed them hard, but I�
��ve always been careful about the hows and the whys. I truly try to be respectful of the genre that gave me my start and has long been my book of choice—and romance is and will continue to be the basis of each of the Brotherhood books.