I promised I'd talk a little bit more about some of the stories I
have for the Jarved Nine world. Please remember that these stories would
be side projects that I wrote between my other books and that I can't
make any promises about when I'll get to them. I hesitated to mention
anything, but an impromptu survey on Twitter agreed that it was okay, so
here I am, blogging them.
When I went home to Minnesota for Christmas, the Jarved Nine world
exploded in my head. I spent a lot of time hammering out overviews of
the stories. Some ideas are more complete than others and some are
missing elements that I'd need to figure out, but I was compelled to get
this information down. I guess it's not wholly surprising as I've had
these characters in my head--most of them anyway--since 2005, when I
wrote Eternal Nights. They've never gone away. I'm not
going to go into too much detail about the actual plots because the
overviews are mostly about characters anyway.
The first story would belong to Zachary "Z-Man" Chen. Zach grew up in
Hawaii and California and he's of European, Chinese, and Hawaiian
descent. One of the first things Zach told me was that he's the team
sniper. Another thing he told me was that in his job, it's critical he
have his head screwed on straight. He's one of the most laid back
members on the team--only Troll is more easygoing--but when he needs to
fire up the intensity, it's like flipping a switch. It's actually kind
of interesting to see how fast he can go from 0 to Mach 2.
Zach's heroine is a scientist assigned to J9 and she's brilliant at
her job. She's also brilliant at pissing people off. I don't believe
it's intentional, although she hasn't said that much yet. I just think
she doesn't realize how abrupt she can be or how others take what she
says. She also always runs at a high level of intensity, and because she
doesn't see Zach in warrior mode right away, she is under the
impression that he's always laid back. She is way wrong, which she'll
find out. Heh!
Story two belongs to Gravedigger, he's the team medic. His real name
is Cutter Wainwright and his heroine is stationed on Jarved Nine, too.
Y'all actually would have heard about her in Eternal Nights
except that my editor cut that conversation between Wyatt and Flare.
(She was right to do it. It slowed down the story and was a distraction
from Wyatt and Kendall.) Cutter comes from a family with a pedigree a
mile long, but the family money disappeared long before he was born. He
joined the army to pay for college, but ended up deciding to stay in.
His heroine is Nadia. She knows most of Cutter's team doesn't think
she's good enough for him, which had her trying to keep her distance
from him. After all, if his team doesn't like her, she can't be more
than a fling to him and Nadia isn't going there. Not even if he is the
hottest guy she's ever met.
The final story in the arc would belong to Francisco "Flare" Cantore. Flare is the team's chief warrant officer. I actually
thought Flare would be first, but no matter how I envisioned the arc,
he didn't fit anywhere except third. Although, the way I've seen things,
there'd be some scenes in his point of view in both Zach and Cutter's
books. Flare has never quite gotten over his ex-wife (something else
that was (correctly) cut from Eternal Nights) and he's not even a little happy to return from a mission to discover she's inside the Old City on J9.
Sasha Cantore (who you met in The Troll Bridge)
isn't any happier to run into Flare. She's put the past behind her--or
so she thought until she keeps running into her ex. There are only about
600 troops on J9. Avoiding someone is nearly impossible. Flare and
Sasha set out to accomplish this impossible task. And fail.
I'm
still torn about having blogged about my plans since, like I said, this
would be a side project. Please don't be disappointed if it takes a long while for anything to get accomplished. Next week, I think I'll talk a little about
what I am officially working on now and share my thoughts on that world.
