Risk of Ruin
Risk of Ruin is my first novel--or at least, the first novel I'm willing to put my name on. Years ago, I used to write pseudonymous and anonymous hack fiction--two cents a word stuff. Risk of Ruin is my apology to all the trees that have died through the years for the terrible books I used to write.What I really wanted to do with this book was violate the common genre formulas I was once forced to adhere to, while at the same time creating a moving love story, a cop drama, a paranormal romance, an erotic potboiler, and an adventure story. To accomplish this, I started by creating main characters that violate the requirements for the protagonists of any of the popular fiction genres.Take Bart, my protagonist/hero. He's five-foot-two and always broke. He works part-time as a hack motorcycle mechanic, when he's not in Reno trying to make money on a professional blackjack team. He's a high school dropout, uses crude language, has satanic tattoos up and down both arms and a Napoleonic superiority complex. He rides a chopped Harley. Bart's not a very sociable guy most of the time. He's a brooding loner who doesn't care much for people. He's angry at the world and his lot in life, but he becomes obsessed with a teenage girl who's working at a strip club using fake ID. Bart definitely would not be cast in the role of hero in any genre of novel that I know of.As for Stacy, she's sixteen years old and her superiority complex is even greater than Bart's, as she believes she's God. Literally. Even though she's leggy, blond and beautiful, there is no genre of novel that would have this character as the hero's love interest.When I first started working on this book, a writer friend told me it was a bad idea because no one would like Bart and no one would accept it as a love story.It's a challenge to make characters like these likeable, but that challenge is what makes writing fun. It would have been boring to write another novel with a protagonist who was tall, dark, handsome, and heroic. Real people aren't like that anyway. Everyone has a dark side, a mean side, a stupid side. Essentially, this is a love story between two misfits.My task was to make Bart into a real hero, someone the reader would be rooting for, while making Stacy a person he could love. Violating the norms of genre fiction forced me to create a story so compelling that the physical, emotional, psychological and social flaws of the characters become irrelevant.I like how it came out--a love story that just has a bit more violence and untypical characters. I fell in love with both Bart and Stacy in the process of writing their story.