Tag: reading

One Day (Give or Take a Time Zone)

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Tomorrow. Or today, depending on where you are in the world and whether we’re running on Australian or US timelines, which is a question I genuinely cannot answer with confidence right now. Somewhere in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, this becomes real.

I should probably explain who I am, for anyone who has stumbled in here without context.

My name is Avery Beckett. I am one of four — yes, four — personas currently occupying the same head, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds and also, apparently, standard industry practice. When I was at university they drummed it into us with considerable conviction: readers won’t follow authors across genres. If you write MM military romance and MM hockey romance and romantasy and magical realism, you need four personas. Keep your audiences clean. Don’t confuse anyone.

I’m not entirely sure I agree. But I also don’t want to alienate anyone, so four personas I have. It makes a certain kind of sense. Most days.

Avery is the military one. I am sassy and sarcastic and possessed of a sense of humour that runs darker than most people expect, which is appropriate given what I write. I have been living with the Compass Point universe since 2018 — refining it, deepening it, rebuilding it from the ground up over the last two years into something I’m genuinely proud of. Forty books across four ten-book series. MM, MF, FF, MFM — because love in the Compass Point universe doesn’t sort itself neatly into categories and I decided early on that I wasn’t going to make it. Whether that turns out to be a brave creative decision or a spectacular miscalculation remains to be seen. Probably both, knowing me.

And that’s before we get to the other Avery projects. The series following a team through special forces selection. The smoke jumper series. The gritty, dirty detective series set during and just after World War Two, which exists in a genre category largely of its own and which I love unreasonably.

I have been writing for a very long time. I have been writing this for a very long time. And somehow, despite all of that, despite the years and the drafts and the refining and the rebuilding and the four factory resets of the modem and the trivia nights and the cats and all of the rest of it — this still feels unreal.

One day. Maybe two. Somewhere in the gap between time zones, Almost Yours Again is going to exist in the world in a way it hasn’t existed before.

Thank you. For every comment and every share and every preorder and every kind word. For reading these rambling posts from someone who still can’t quite believe this is happening. For being here at the beginning of something that I have waited a very long time to share.

It means more than I know how to say. And given that I write for a living, that is saying something.

How Compass Point Became More Than Just a Series

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People sometimes ask me how I know these characters so well. How Marc moves, how Finn thinks, why Knox holds the world the way he does. The honest answer is: I’ve been living with them for a very long time, and the road that brought us here is not the road I expected to be on.

Compass Point started, as many great things do, with a best friend and a very good idea.

It wasn’t quite fanfic. Almost. The plan was something like fanfic — take the characters we loved from something else, keep the best parts of them, round out their edges for a military and PI setting, write the story we wanted to read. My best friend and I were going to build it together. And we started to. But somewhere in the building, something shifted. Our characters started feeling more real to us than the ones we’d borrowed them from. They started making their own decisions, developing their own histories, wanting things the originals never wanted. So we changed the names. Changed most of what there was to change. And they became ours.

We kept writing together. Forty-five books, shorter than they are now, built across years of loving these characters and needing to tell their stories. And then something wonderful and slightly chaotic happened, as it tends to when creative people spend enough time together: we both kept growing, but in different directions. The universe we’d built together started morphing — shifting from gritty ex-military PI territory into something altogether more magical. Magical realism crept in, as it does, and the original stories began to change shape around it.

Except the boys had opinions about that.

Marc and Finn and Knox, bless them, did not want to change. They had been built in a particular world and they intended to stay in it, thank you very much. So my friend and I had a conversation, and she gave me something extraordinary — she told me to keep them. Keep what I’d written, make it fully mine, release it as my own work.

And here is the part I love most: we are still writing together. The original stories, the ones that started all of this, are still being written — now with that magical realism woven through them, now with the universe we’ve both been building. We didn’t part ways. We just found we had two sets of stories to tell instead of one.

The gift of it, beyond the obvious, was this: I arrived at my new beginning already knowing these people down to the bone. I don’t have to think about how Marc will react under pressure or what Finn will sacrifice without being asked or how Knox loves — fiercely, quietly, with his whole chest. I just know. The way you know the people who have been in your life long enough to become part of your furniture.

So I took those forty-five books, already written and already loved, and I started making them into what they always deserved to be. Deeper. Fuller. Given the space their stories actually needed. The first ten are completely finished and working through their final edits. The next ten are close — they need a little adjustment because some of the earlier outcomes have shifted, the way they do when a series grows into itself and you have to go back and make the foundations match the building. Books twenty to thirty are fleshed out and need a little more attention. Series four is all there in first draft, waiting for the polish that’s coming.

It’s a long road. But I know exactly who I’m travelling it with — both the characters who refused to leave, and the friend who let me keep them.

These people are real to me in a way that defies easy explanation. Not real in a worrying way — I know the difference between a character and a person. But real in the way that matters for writing: I understand them. I love them. I would go to considerable lengths to do right by them.

That’s what Compass Point is. That’s why it’s more than just a series.

— 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