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These past two weeks have been kind of crazy. It’s good to be back! 

After a long work week, I decided to tuck into a new book last Friday and little did I know, I ended up reading four books in two days. Gobbled those suckers up. Then I proceeded to read a book a day for the rest of the next week. (Psst, I was reading Cate C. Wells).

I’m back now, though. My mind’s still reeling from that whirlwind haha.

In fact, I think reading those books helped me a lot. First of all, her shifter books opened my eyes to certain expectations readers might have. I’m currently editing Unchanged, a dark fantasy book with shifters. Paranormal books set in urban settings or even sometimes fantasy settings can be heavily immersed with elements of the Omegaverse. Unchanged has shifters that think like humans and don’t have primal urges like many intricate relationships between alphas, betas, and omegas.

I immediately needed to put that information in my book to set the reader’s expectations. 

Another element I noticed in Cate C. Wells books, was that the FMCs were always diverse and had a distinct strength and logic to their thinking. While I loved this, I also noticed something else.

I like authors like George R. R. Martin and Pierce Brown because their characters lose valuable things. And it’s not like they lose something and gain another (they sometimes do), but that their characters have to work through the loss. 

Let me explain. 

In the Red Rising original trilogy, Pierce Brown wrote Darrow in a way he was able to build a ‘dream team’ from the ground up. It included characters that fit like chess pieces. The strong one, the smart one, the crazy one, and the pawns that bolstered the numbers.

The pawns were killed strategically. Darrow’s response to their deaths swayed the side character’s opinion of him. Brown set up the tension so well, I don’t feel he actually needed to kill off Pax, one of Darrow’s friends in the inner circle.

But he did. And Brown did it again later in the series with Ragnar. 

Pierce Brown built tension and a world that felt organized in a reader’s mind. The patterns aligned. And then he killed off essential characters and kept the plot going. Like life didn’t stop when tragedy struck. Darrow and the other characters not only had to deal with grief, but also navigate moving through their world without the characters filling certain plot roles. 

I think that’s so interesting when circling back to Cate C. Wells. Take one of her FMCs, Una, a shifter with a leg that doesn’t fully function. She loves gardening, growing mushrooms, and sneaking off to the farmer’s market. A good, well-rounded character typically found in a romance.

Her wolf is small and when she gets into a fight, she’s basically thrown out the back door. But only her pride is hurt. By the end of the book, it’s water under the bridge. In fact, the whole point of the book is navigating her life with a disability and coming to terms with her feelings towards the MMC.

I loved that series (I mean, I did read all of them), but I felt like something was missing. Like a dust bunny under a hundred mattresses.  

And I think it was that a character losing something, or being at a disadvantage, doesn’t inherently do anything for the story if what they lose isn’t something impactful. Sometimes it feels like the HEA washes away all the bad. And to me, I don’t think that’s as satisfying.

Chat soon, 

Arquie