For this month’s post, I was going to write about beta readers. I solicited feedback from authors, wrote down my own beta process, and had a general idea sketched out in my head. I had a plan. Then, yesterday, I read a book. This serial book eviscerated me, tore me into little pieces, and left me trembling, alone in the dark. Each subsequent piece So, instead of my carefully laid plan, I’m going to show you how my creative process works.

Really horrible shit has happened to me in my life. There’s no pretty euphemism for it. There are no five-dollar words to describe it. I survive it every day and I put one foot in front of the other. My novels, books like Aaron, Abandoned, In the Absence of Monsters, and A Heart for Robbie are byproducts of that survival. Like the character in the book I just read, when I write, the darkness bubbles over in me—out of my mind, and out of my heart because I can’t contain it anymore.  It spews across the page like bile. In Aaron and some parts of Monsters, it’s raw and unchecked A pain so old and so deep, I couldn’t edit myself as the words came. By the time I’d written Robbie, I was better able to pull the punch. It was raw and emotional, but not traumatizing as Aaron was.

As I lie here now, in the pre-dawn morning on the heels of a sleepless night, I can still feel the precise edge of those words as they rip me open. They’ve exposed that jagged hole in me where the rot and the blackness ate away at my soul. Mackey has taken up residence inside me somewhere. Especially in the middle parts of the series, we’re so much alike, he and I–it’s like everything I never wanted to see in a mirror. My friends see it and I’m always left to wonder which will be the next to make their escape, walking away because they can no longer deal with my insanity. I think the worst part of the book was feeling like one of them, to be accepted as a Sanders, only to have it ripped away by turning that last page.

As an author, the book challenged me. I’ll never write at that level, but it whispered to me, secrets in the dark. It tells me that in my current WIP, the brother needs to fail epically, the main character’s hate needs to be deeper, the other character’s resentment needs to flourish like flowers in the spring, popping up in unexpected places. They need to do things they regret deeply.

A good book makes your heart sing.

A great book makes you weep.

A brilliant book eviscerates you and shows you things you never expected to see.

The author has given me permission to reveal that I’ve read the entire series, so I will tell you that the book that captivated me so completely was Beneath the Stain by Amy Lane. She’s been talking to me about Mackey for a long time now, and I’m so incredibly glad I got to meet him. I can’t wait to put him on my shelf with the collection of very few paperbacks I treasure. And thank you, Amy Lane, for trusting me with him. I know what it’s like to turn your closest held boy out into the world and let him fly.

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Award winning romance novelist, J. P. Barnaby has penned over a dozen books including the Working Boys series, the Little Boy Lost series, In the Absence of Monsters,and Aaron. As a bisexual woman, J.P. is a proud member of the GLBT community both online and in her small town on the outskirts of Chicago. A member of Mensa, she is described as brilliant but troubled, sweet but introverted, and talented but deviant. She spends her days writing software and her nights writing erotica, which is, of course, far more interesting. The spare time that she carves out between her career and her novels is spent reading about the concept of love, which, like some of her characters, she has never quite figured out for herself.

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