Tag: book-reviews

The Hardest Scene to Write

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Every book has one. The scene you circle for days before you finally sit down and face it. The scene you write and delete and rewrite, not because you can’t find the words but because the words keep costing you something.

For Almost Yours Again, it was the first one.

Not the inciting incident. Not the climax. The very first scene — Finn walking back to Marc.

I need you to understand what that costs him, because I think it’s easy to read courage and miss the layers underneath it. Finn Cooper is not, at this point in the story, a man who has much left to lose. He is broken in ways that he has stopped trying to catalogue. He is running on the particular kind of fuel that people run on when they have nothing left except one thing — one person they would burn themselves down to protect.

Flick. His sister. The person he has already sacrificed more for than anyone should ever have to sacrifice.

And he knows, with absolute clarity, that Marc will keep her safe. Regardless of everything. Regardless of how thoroughly and justifiably Marc now hates him. That is not a question in Finn’s mind — it is the one certainty he is carrying into that room. Marc Dalton is a great many complicated things, but he does not let innocent people come to harm. Finn knows this the way he knows his own heartbeat.

So Finn will fall on his sword. Willingly. He will hand Marc whatever ammunition Marc needs, accept whatever judgement is coming, make himself the price of Flick’s safety without flinching. That part, as terrifying as it is, is almost simple. It is a transaction Finn has already agreed to internally before he ever knocks on the door.

What he is not prepared for is the other thing.

Because somewhere underneath the broken pragmatism of Marc will protect her, there is something Finn has not fully let himself examine. He still loves Marc. He has never stopped. It is not something he chose or something he can undo — it is simply true, the way gravity is true, constant and unglamorous and not particularly interested in whether it’s convenient.

But here is the thing about Finn that took me a long time to fully understand, and that I think is the key to everything he is: the distance didn’t diminish it. Every month apart, every silence, every version of the life he was supposed to have that quietly closed its doors — none of it made him love Marc less. It made him love Marc more. As though loss and longing, instead of wearing the feeling down, kept deepening it. Kept adding to it. As though Finn’s love for Marc grew in the dark the way some things do — not despite the absence of light but because of it.

By the time he walks back through that door he is carrying years of that. Years of a love that just kept growing with nowhere to go.

And he does not believe it goes the other way anymore. How could it? After everything. After the choices Finn made and the damage they caused and the particular, irreversible way he disappeared from Marc’s life. Love does not survive all of that intact — or so Finn has told himself, so many times that it has become the architecture of how he moves through the world. He has accepted it. He is not walking back to Marc to reclaim anything for himself.

That is what makes it the hardest scene I’ve ever written.

Not the courage it takes to walk into that room knowing he might not walk back out the same way. Not the fear, not the brokenness, not the weight of everything riding on the next few minutes. What makes it almost unbearable to write is the quiet devastation of a man carrying a love that has only ever grown larger, walking toward the person at the centre of it, certain — absolutely certain — that what he’s bringing has nowhere left to land.

Finn is not hoping when he goes back to Marc. He has placed himself beyond hope, because hope is a luxury he can’t afford and a wound he can’t survive reopening.

He just loves him. Deeply, helplessly, more than ever.

And he’s made peace with the fact that it doesn’t matter anymore.

That is so much harder to write than anything a bullet could do to him.

And that is exactly why it had to be the first scene.

— Avery

Writing Men Who Love Softly

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There is a particular kind of man I keep coming back to in my writing.

He is not soft in the way the word is sometimes used as an insult — he is not weak, not passive, not without edges. He has often survived things that would have unmade a person with less core. He carries himself with a kind of controlled stillness that people sometimes mistake for coldness. He is, by most external measures, formidable.

And he loves like he’s terrified of what it means that he loves this much.

That’s the man I’m interested in. That’s always been the man I’m interested in.

Marc Dalton is not a soft man by anyone’s definition of the word. He is a man who was built, through circumstance and necessity and years of operating in environments that rewarded hardness, to take up a very specific shape. Contained. Controlled. Competent in ways that leave very little room for uncertainty. He leads, he protects, he solves — and he does all of it from behind a level of emotional management that took decades to construct.

And then there is Finn Cooper, who is — in his own way — just as armoured. Finn’s softness is deceptive, and that’s what makes him so interesting to write. He looks more open, more present, more immediately warm than Marc. But Finn stopped eating to keep his sister safe. Finn dragged a man thirty metres with a fractured skull. Finn’s softness is not fragility. It’s something that survived an enormous amount and came out the other side still capable of tenderness, and that’s a very different thing.

What happens between them is not the collision of hard and soft. It’s the collision of two people who both built walls — different walls, different materials, different architectural styles — and then found themselves in a space where the walls were no longer strictly necessary and had no idea what to do with that information.

That’s where the love lives. In that not-knowing.

When I write men who love softly, I’m not writing men who have been declawed or domesticated or relieved of their complexity for the sake of being palatable. I am writing men who have access to the full range of what it means to be human — which includes tenderness, and uncertainty, and the willingness to be seen — alongside everything else they are.

Marc learning to let Finn in is not Marc becoming less. It is Marc becoming more. The control doesn’t disappear — it shifts. It turns toward something. He brings to loving Finn the same absolute commitment he brings to everything else in his life, and when you combine that with a man who has finally been given somewhere safe to direct it, the result is — well. It’s the reason I write.

Finn, for his part, loves with a kind of fierce quiet that surprises people who’ve misread his openness as lightness. He is not light. He is warm, which is a different thing entirely. He loves Marc with the same determination he applied to surviving everything that came before Marc — completely, practically, without drama, as if it is simply the next right thing and he has decided to do it properly.

Two men who have been through the fire, loving each other with every tool the fire left them.

That’s soft, in the way I mean it. Not gentle as the opposite of strong. Soft as in — without armour. Soft as in — here I am, this is what I actually am, and I am giving it to you anyway.

I think we underfund this narrative in fiction about men. We are very good at the falling — the tension, the conflict, the almost-and-not-yet. We are less practiced at the being in it. The morning-light version of love. The quiet scene that doesn’t have dramatic stakes, just two people existing in the same space and choosing each other in a way that is so habitual it’s become structural, like load-bearing walls.

Marc making Finn coffee before he’s asked. Finn knowing exactly when to speak and when to simply be present. The way they have built, without a blueprint and against considerable odds, something that holds.

That’s what I want to write. Men who are not diminished by love but completed by it. Men who arrive at tenderness the long and difficult way and turn out to be extraordinarily good at it.

Men who love softly.

It’s the bravest thing I know how to write.

— Avery

The Characters Who Refused To Be Minor

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Every writer has them. The characters you built for a purpose — a plot function, a narrative requirement, a single scene that needed filling — who turn around somewhere around chapter three and inform you, with considerable conviction, that they have no intention of being what you designed them to be. They are going to be something larger. They were always going to be something larger. You just didn’t know it yet.

Flick Cooper was supposed to be a plot device.

I say this with full honesty and no apology, because understanding what she was supposed to be is the only way to appreciate what she became. Flick existed, initially, to explain Finn. Specifically, to explain why Finn had let himself go so badly — why a man with his capacity and his history had arrived at the state he was in when Marc found him. The answer was Flick. His sister. The one their father had sold, the one Finn had spent years quietly destroying himself to protect, the financial calculation he made every time he chose not to eat so the money could go somewhere it mattered more than feeding him. She was backstory. She was the why behind the wound.

She had other ideas.

Flick dug her heels in somewhere in the drafting and simply refused to leave. Not loudly — that’s the thing about Flick, she is not always loud about what she wants, she is simply immovable once she has decided — but with a persistence that made it increasingly clear that she was not going to be filed under ‘plot function’ and left there. She wanted the full story. She wanted the complexity. She wanted the band she’d built with Izabella, and she wanted Izabella with her, and she pulled both of them out of the margins and into the centre with the quiet stubbornness of someone who has survived considerable things and has decided she is owed a story of her own.

And she was right. She was absolutely right. Flick is one of the most specific and fully alive characters in the Compass Point universe, and she became that by refusing to be less than she was. She brought Izzy with her — Marc’s daughter, sixteen, a musician finding her way inside a family that is considerably more complicated than most — and the two of them together changed the texture of the books in ways I could not have planned and would not trade.

If I have to choose, though — if I have to identify the characters outside of Marc and Finn who carry the most weight with me — I always come back to Knox and Garrett.

These two arrived with their own gravity and they never let it go.

What strikes me most about Knox and Garrett is this: they may be more broken than Marc and Finn. I say that with full understanding of how much that means, given what Marc and Finn have been through. But the breaking is different. Marc and Finn’s damage has a specific shape — it comes from specific origins, it was done to them by specific forces, and its edges are, with enough time, mappable. Knox and Garrett’s damage is the kind that builds slowly, that comes from the accumulation of right choices made in impossible circumstances, from carrying things that are too heavy for too long in the service of people who need them to keep standing.

Knox’s hearing is going. He carries this quietly, which is the most Knox possible response to something that would destroy most people’s sense of themselves. Garrett’s nights are a war zone he navigates alone, or has until now. Both of them are people who have done everything right and paid the full cost of doing everything right, and the love between them — ten years of it, unacknowledged, held in trust because naming it felt more dangerous than carrying it — is the love of two people who have protected everyone except each other.

They bear equal weight with me. That is the truest thing I can say about them. I hold them as carefully as I hold Marc and Finn, which is saying a great deal.

Flick refused to be a device. Knox and Garrett refused to be minor characters. They were all right. Some of the best things in the Compass Point universe exist because the characters themselves demanded them.

I have learned to listen when they dig their heels in.

— Avery

On Building Something Large — And the Characters Who Won’t Wait

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I spent today in the architecture of a future series. I say future because I have no business being here yet — I am deep in edits for the Dead Reckoners, and Sunny and Donovan and their people deserve my full attention, and they are getting it, mostly, except for the hours I apparently spent today doing this instead.

The new series has a name. The Shape of Family. Five duologies, running concurrently, built around a found family and the specific, different kinds of love that take root inside one.

Here is the structural decision that everything else hangs from: all five Book Ones end at the same moment. A chopper goes down in the field. Part of the unit is captured. Each of the five couples arrives at that ending from a completely different place — different stages of acknowledgement, different degrees of having named what they are to each other, different amounts of armour still in place. The crash doesn’t care about any of that. It happens to all of them simultaneously, and the reader who has followed all five will arrive at it five times and understand it differently every time.

Book Two in each duology deals with the aftermath. What captivity does to people. What thirty-six hours of not knowing does to the people waiting. What the recovery looks like when the relationship underneath it is at five different stages of becoming. Five registers. Five emotional architectures. One event that the whole universe passes through together.

After Marc and Finn and their people have told their stories fully — after the Compass Point universe has been given everything it deserves — Alex, Isaac and Adam are going to be ready to begin. They have been sitting in the back of my head for some time now, these new boys and girls, and they are not being quiet about it. They have things to tell me. They are, frankly, quite insistent.

I should not be writing this yet. I have said this to them. They are not listening, which is how I know they are real.

The Shape of Family. Five duologies. Ten books. A found family that builds itself from the ruins of the ones these people lost, and loves each other into something permanent and chosen and entirely their own.

I cannot wait.

— Avery

Why Broken Characters Feel The Most Human To Me

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I’ve been asked before why I keep writing damaged men.

It’s a fair question. The Compass Point universe is full of them — ex-military, ex-operational, men who came home carrying things that don’t show up on any medical chart. Men who are functional on the outside and quietly fractured somewhere deeper. Men who have learned to perform okayness so convincingly that even the people who love them sometimes miss what’s underneath.

The honest answer is: because that’s what humans look like to me.

Not the polished ones. Not the ones who have it together. The ones who are doing their level best with a set of tools that got bent out of shape somewhere along the way. The ones who still show up, still try, still reach toward connection even when every instinct they have is telling them to pull back and protect themselves. Those are the characters that feel real to me. Those are the characters I can’t stop writing.

Marc and Finn felt important for a reason that’s a little difficult to articulate, which is usually a sign that it matters.

They’re not damaged in the same ways. That was the first thing that pulled me toward them — the idea that two people can be equally broken and broken entirely differently, and have to learn to navigate not just each other’s wounds but the strange places where those wounds intersect. Where one person’s damage presses directly on another person’s fracture line without either of them meaning for it to. That’s where the interesting writing lives. Not in the wound itself, but in the gap between two people who are both trying and both struggling and both — underneath all of it — desperately wanting to be known by someone.

There’s a particular kind of courage in an emotionally damaged character that I don’t think we talk about enough. It’s not the courage of the battlefield, though these men have that too. It’s the smaller, quieter, more frightening courage of choosing to try again. Of staying in a room when every trained instinct says to leave. Of saying the thing out loud when silence would be so much safer. That courage isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t make for a great action sequence. But it’s the thing that undoes me every time, as a writer and as a reader.

Marc and Finn made me work for their story in ways that felt important. They didn’t make it easy. They weren’t going to let me write around the hard parts or soften the edges or resolve things faster than they could realistically resolve. They needed me to sit in the discomfort with them, which is — I think — exactly what good romance requires. Not the avoidance of pain but the willingness to move through it, together, toward something real.

The thing about broken characters is that wholeness, when it comes, means something. It can’t be taken for granted. It was paid for in full, and the reader knows it, and the characters know it, and that earned quality of the happy ending is what separates a love story that stays with you from one that simply concludes.

I write damaged men because damage is honest. Because healing is the most hopeful thing I know how to put on a page. And because Marc Dalton and Finn Cooper reminded me, all over again, that the most human thing any of us can do is keep reaching for connection even when we’re not sure we deserve it.

They deserved it.

They always did.

— Avery

It’s Getting Very Real (And I’m Not Okay — In the Best Possible Way)

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I’ve been trying to write this post for three weeks.

Every time I sit down to do it, I stare at the screen for a while, type something, delete it, and go make another cup of tea. My friend Karen, who has heard more about this book and these characters than any person should reasonably have to endure, has been very patient. She has also been very gently suggesting, in the way she does, that perhaps I should just write the thing, Avery.

So. I’m writing the thing.

Almost Yours Again is at the editor. The cover has been made. The cover reveal is locked in for May 20th. And the book goes live on June 1st.

June 1st. Thirty-four days from today.

I need you to understand something about what it means to type that sentence.

I have been living inside the Compass Point Security universe for fifteen years. Alone, mostly, in the way that writing is always fundamentally alone — just me and the characters and the particular madness of a world that refused to stop expanding every time I turned my back on it. Forty books across four series. The novellas that exist because certain characters were absolutely not going to accept a supporting role and I don’t know why I ever thought they would. Fifteen years of notes and scenes and timelines and character voices that have become so familiar I sometimes forget they don’t actually exist.

Karen has been alongside me for a lot of that. Not writing Avery — that’s mine, entirely mine, my voice and my world and my particular obsession — but there. The person on the other end of the phone when I couldn’t work something out. The one who has heard about Marc and Finn probably more than she ever asked to, and who kept listening anyway. We work together on other projects, Karen and I, and that partnership has taught me what it means to have someone who truly understands what you’re trying to do — which makes her support of this work, the work that’s entirely my own, mean more than I can easily say.

But Almost Yours Again is mine. That matters to me and I want to say it clearly, because this is the work I built alone across fifteen years and a great deal of very strong tea.

Marc and Finn are the heart of everything in this universe. That’s not hyperbole — it’s architecture. Every series, every character, every thread that runs through Compass Point traces back to them. They are the reason the world exists in the form it does. And Almost Yours Again is their story: the one I’ve been holding the longest, the one I’ve circled back to again and again over fifteen years of building everything else around it. The one that had to come first, even though — especially because — it’s the most important one.

For those of you who are new here: Marc Dalton and Finn Cooper are the soul of Compass Point Security. Everything else in this universe grows from what they are to each other, what they’ve been through, and what it costs two people to find their way back when the distance between them has been measured in years and silence and choices that couldn’t be unmade. That’s all I’m going to say right now. The book will say the rest.

For those of you who have been waiting — who have been here through the years of it’s coming, I promise it’s coming — I don’t have adequate words for what it means to finally be writing it’s here. Or almost here. Close enough that I can see it from where I’m standing and it doesn’t disappear when I blink.

The manuscript is with the editor, which means it’s temporarily out of my hands and in capable ones. The cover exists and is beautiful and I am being heroically restrained about not sharing it before the 20th. Fifteen years of waiting has given me a certain capacity for delayed gratification. I am drawing on every last bit of it.

Here is what I know about June 1st: it’s the day forty books get their foundation. Everything I have built in this universe — every team, every mission, every love story, every scar and every choice and every moment of two people deciding each other is worth the risk — gets its why on that day. Marc and Finn are the answer to questions the rest of the series is still asking. That’s what it means to have lived in a world this long. You know, eventually, where everything comes from.

This is where it comes from.

Fifteen years. One universe. The cover reveal is May 20th. The book is June 1st.

Almost there. Almost yours.

— Avery

Almost Yours Again is Book 1 of the Compass Point Security universe — the beginning of forty books across four series. Cover reveal: May 20th. Publication: June 1st. Sign up to the newsletter to be the first to see it.