It’s been a long time coming, but Smoldering Betrayal, book 1 of the Black Fire Trilogy, is out!
Not only has it been a long time coming, but it is a book that turned out a lot different than I first envisioned.
The story of Matt Ansaro’s return to his hometown to spy on friends and family during the 1922 national coal strike first took shape years ago. When I read about the coal strike, I knew I wanted to write a novel about it. The original idea was that a company spy would be turned into a double agent when his girlfriend is kidnapped by miners.
I also had a great title for the book. It was In Coal Blood.
I attempted to write the story only to meet with failure. I would get a couple of chapters into the story and run into a wall. I would outline the story and then do it again. Yet, I kept hitting the wall.
I put the project on the shelf and would return to it occasionally still hitting the wall.
Then in January 2018, I had a simple thought that changed the way I looked at the story and broke the logjam. That simple change was to make Matt Ansaro (who’d been named John Montgomery in the original story) connected to Eckhart Mines. Once I made the decision to make Eckhart Mines Matt’s hometown, I started getting all sorts of ideas about the characters, plot points, and the setting. I found myself carrying around a pad and pen to write down thoughts wherever I went. When I was in the car, I would record scenes, ideas, and snatches of dialogue that came to me. I would even be recording thoughts before I fell asleep at night.
I wrote more of the story in three days than I had in six years.
It quickly became apparent that the original story would take up more than one book. I researched like crazy. Because I was writing before I had a chance to research the setting, I had to make sure that the story fit the ways things were in Eckhart Mines in 1922 in later drafts.
Smoldering Betrayal contains some of the element of the original story, but also a lot of new ideas and characters I hadn’t planned in the original book.
I love how the book turned out. My beta readers enjoyed it, and I hope that you will, too.
Check out Smoldering Betrayal here.
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