EXPOSURE, one of my summer 2018 novellas, was about a character (photographer and ex-Broadway dancer Andy Martin) who's appeared in a whole lot of the others, plus a character (actor and singer Victor Garcia) from MILLION DOLLAR DEATH.
I say ‘was’ because it’s not a novella anymore; it is an 84,000-word novel. My infatuation with Andy and Victor finally got the better of me.
Once again, I have found the perfect embodiment for one of my characters via unsplash.com. Like several of my others, this image is by Christian Buehner, @christianbuehner, with thanks. Click the image for product link!
I wrote three novellas in a row that stole characters from MILLION DOLLAR DEATH. Those protagonists have since made appearances in other novellas and full-length novels, but not on the same scale that Andy and Victor have.
EXPOSURE started getting bigger while I was writing THE GHOST OF CARLOS GARDEL, a novel in which Andy and Victor became the main characters even though that was not my intention at the beginning. (They keep doing this.) Then this summer, during my unemployment, I wrote a whole new novel about them (NEVER ENOUGH, published around March 2020). I learned so much about them while I was writing that!
And I have basically given in to them. I didn’t try to put them in the other two novels, already written, that I’ll publish next year. I didn’t try to put them in two other things (a novella and a novel), already written, that I’ll publish before the end of this year. All four of those projects taught me even more about them. So once I knew I was heading into re-employment I surrendered. Rather than starting a whole new project, I took EXPOSURE and rewrote it to include all that I’d learned about Andy and Victor from writing those other things.
This rewrite-and-expansion gave me the opportunity to enhance the roles played by other characters. Rory and Dana (STRIPPED) are good friends of Andy’s; they get more page time now. Dmitri and Patrick (who appear throughout the series) are present now in a way they weren’t before. Janis Vaughn (the upcoming novella A SECRET CHORD) gets introduced here; she didn’t exist when EXPOSURE was originally written. A new character was added, who will be getting his own story soon.
But mostly there is a lot more of Andy and Victor’s love story. This is now, officially, Novel Number 6. Chock-full of adult situations, themes, and language, plus entertainment-industry-adjacent Problems To Solve.