Review: The Will Darling Adventures

It is time for another review, this one about a trilogy of books: the Will Darling Adventures. After the last time I reviewed a book (“The Jane Austen Handbook”) months after buying and reading it, I thought I should definitely get around to it faster this time. So I finished the books and wrote the review.

 

The Will Darling Adventures include three novels by K.J. Charles: “Slippery Creatures”, “The Sugared Game”, and “Subtle Blood”. They’re set in the 1920s in Britain and include, as all K.J. Charles novels (apart from “Proper English” which has a female/female pairing) a male/male romance. In this case the romance between William Darling and Kim Secretan, which is of the slow-burn variety. It takes them all three books to get together properly. To be fair, though, they do have a lot of stuff to work through what with Will being a cold-blooded killer who is also a used books seller and Kim lying to people constantly while being a spy.

As this already suggests, stakes are high in the three novels as Will and Kim not only battle a secret underground organisation set on destroying the government and building a new one, but also the morals of their time when ‘gross indecency,’ aka. ‘having a sexual relationship with another man,’ could get you jailed for two years. Needless to say that an organisation set on destroying the government wouldn’t shy away from trying to use such a relationship against those on their trail…

There are other stakes to the romance as well. Will is a simple working-class man who changed severely during his time in the army and in war. He was a trench raider (part of a group going into enemy trenches to kill the soldiers in the dead of the night) and has killed many in war. It has made him cavalier about killing others if he has good reason, such as his (or Kim’s) life being in danger. Kim, on the other hand, is officially ‘Lord Arthur Secretan,’ second son of a high-ranking noble family (which is explored more in the third book). How can a privately-educated, well-spoken nobleman and a grammar-schooled, war-damaged working-class man actually have a successful and lasting relationship?

 

I needed three tries to read through the books. The first two times I started “Slippery Creatures”, I didn’t get through the first chapter - even though it does start with action, as Will is mistaken for his deceased uncle who was also called ‘William Darling’ and owned the bookshop before him and has some strange demands from people who talk about daffodils or claim to be with the War Office. The third time when I dug in and went through the first chapter, I found myself captivated by the story once I reached the second one - which shows that first chapters are not always an indication of how well you’ll like the whole book.

As a matter of fact, when I finally made it through the first book, enjoying myself very much as I followed Will through this strange situation, I immediately started to read the second one. “The Sugared Game” surprised me with an ending I wouldn’t have expected from the second book in a trilogy - it seemed as if the action plot of the story was finished. It was not, as I began to realize halfway through “Subtle Blood”. What started as a more personal plot for Kim - his surviving brother being accused of murder, which could put him in the ‘heir’ position and separate him from Will for good -, pivoted into the real end of the ‘Zodiac’ situation.

I found “Subtle Blood” hard to put down, especially at my usual bedtime, and ended up reading for over an hour longer than I would normally be up, just to finish it. I can’t say I regret it, although I horribly overslept the next morning because of it and woke with a slight headache. The book was totally worth staying up for longer.

 

At this point, I feel I have to add a warning, though. K.J. Charles writes male/male erotica, so the romantic relationship between Will and Kim is accompanied by an ample number of sex scenes featuring them.

K.J. Charles writes her sex scenes exceedingly well - while the physical actions are described in detail, the focus is not on the mechanical parts of having sex, but on the emotional ones. This isn’t just ‘two strangers meeting for a little fun in the dark,’ this is a story about two men growing closer and investing emotionally into that relationship as well. Will and Kim don’t just have sex to have sex - it brings them closer.

That even features in the plot - Kim is reluctant to have sex with Will when it’s just about distracting him or keeping him from going home already whereas he’s enthusiastic about having sex with Will when it’s just about the two of them. Despite being an excellent and almost habitual liar, Kim still has his standards.

 

At their hearts, all three books of the trilogy are spy thrillers. They have the experienced spy (Kim), the newcomer who is drawn into this world unknowingly, at least the first time around (Will), the mysterious enemy organisation (Zodiac), the secret organisation working for the government the spy is part of (Private Bureau), a host of thugs, dangerous situations, daring escapes, and some 1920s glamour.

The setting in the 1920s means that a lot of modern means are not available to our heroes. In the beginning, Will doesn’t have a phone in his own shop and he can’t drive a car because that’s not a standard in the 1920s. There’s no smartphones, no internet to do quick research, no spy gadgets. There’s only two people in the middle of a dangerous game who have to get by on their intelligence and their skills, be it Will’s ability to silently and quickly kill people or Kim’s ability to talk his way out of many situations with a glib lie or two.

I was surprised when the second book seemed to end with Zodiac’s leader killed and the organisation on the way to dissolution. I was also worried - with the action plot finished, would the third book I knew existed have a completely new action plot while finishing the romance one? Yet, no villain worth their salt is destroyed when you think they are and a secret organisation often is like a Hydra - you cut one head off and another takes over…

 

For a story set in 1920s London, the three novels are quite diverse. While both Will and Kim are white men (if not straight white men), there are others.

Will’s best friend Maisie Jones is a woman of colour, but not simply presented as the ‘token black friend’ at all. She has her own plot going on and becomes Marguerite Zie by the end - a Paris fashion designer who sells her clothes through the store of her passionate girlfriend Phoebe (who had a ‘business’ engagement with Kim before).

There are future lords and excellent high-society lawyers who are not white, too. Harry Mitra, the lawyer, is of Indian descent and at the same time a member of an exclusive club and a sought-after solicitor. George Yoxall is of African descent, a member of the same exclusive club, and a future lord, following his uncle who also happened to be Will’s commanding officer for a while and who, it is suggested, is black as well. The two men have no arc of their own, but they make it clear society in London, even high society, is no longer completely white.

Their ancestry also makes sense, as Britain is still an Empire at that point, only in the process of losing its status. There are many colonies and people from there are allowed into England as well.

 

I enjoyed reading the books very much. K.J. Charles’ writing style goes well with my tastes in writing, she is very good at researching details for her books, and her stories always have a lot of action in addition to the romance. Her sex scenes are always worth reading as well and they fit into the story as a such - it’s not ‘porn peppered in to titillate the reader,’ it’s part of the plot development. I liked the twists in the story very much, especially the ‘Zodiac is dead, long live Zodiac’ twist.

I also do have a creeping suspicion about a side character who turns up in the second and third book - DS, the head of the Private Bureau. From the description the first time Will meets him, he bears a certain semblance to a main character from one of K.J. Charles’ earlier books, “Think of England”. Daniel da Silva is a spy from a government organisation who makes up one half of the pairing. He is Jewish, has dark hair and a darker complexion, and wears glasses in the last scene of the story. He also has the same sharp tongue as DS (and, of course, the letters fit with his name, either just da Silva or Daniel da Silva). From the time between “Think of England”, which is set in the first decade of the twentieth century (1904), and the Will Darling Adventures, he could be leading the bureau by then.

 

If you like male/male erotica with a historical backdrop, spy stories, or just a lot of action in and out of bed, I can only recommend the Will Darling Adventures trilogy. If you can stomach male/male romance, and like spy stories and historical settings, you could always flip through the sex scenes, although it would be a shame. All three books are fun to read and will draw you in with great characters, good writing, and good plots.

'Born Author' is a Hurtful Idea

 

To be good at writing, you have to be a ‘born author.’ That’s what quite some people still believe today. Strangely enough, they don’t say the same about painters, sculptors, or composers. All of those fields need a certain talent so you can thrive in them, but only one, writing, is considered something you need to be a ‘natural’ at. Why is that? Well, I blame the Romantics.

 

The Romantic movement, starting in the late 1700s, was a counter-movement to neo-classicism. The neo-classicism clung closely to the art as made by or inspired by Ancient Greece. Plays were based on Aristotle’s five-act structure (which is, to be fair, not a bad structure to use). Statues were sculpted to be similar to the marble statues of Ancient Greece (yet, people didn’t know that those were originally painted in strong colours, so those new statues were kept in a pristine white). Paintings were often based on Greek mythology, depicting the gods and heroes of Ancient Greece, too. Only the composers, to stay with that list above, were spared it, because we know little about the music then.

The followers of the Romantic movement rebelled against all of that. They didn’t want the strict rules and structures of neo-classicism, instead they wanted for everything to be ‘natural.’ It was a first dip into realism for painters or sculptors, but it came at a terrible price for writers. By the idea of the Romantic movement, writing was an act of instinct, of following inspiration without any plans or structures to cling to. An author was either good at their job or not, there was no room for improvement.

This, of course, is an epic level of bullshit. Yet, the idea still persists today.

 

Germany is one of the countries where the idea of the ‘born author’ is still going very strong - not a surprise, as it is where the Romantic movement was born. When I started writing, there was exactly one very heavy book on writing in German which, I have to say, is next to useless for the casual writer who wants to know how to do it well. It’s pretty useful if you have some bugs in your flat, though - nothing can withstand the weight of this book.

It was only when I started buying books on Amazon, where I could get books from all over the world, that I began to gather my own books on writing advice. They, unlike that German brick, were useful. They helped me with structure, with plotting, and with wordcraft. Wordcraft especially is lacking in German writing advice - ‘born authors’ know how to spin their words.

Finding those books and, later on, blogs on writing, has proven invaluable for me and certainly helped me on the way to better writing. Like painting, sculpting, or composing, writing is a craft as well as an art and there’s no way of getting better at it without practice.

 

The idea behind the ‘born author’ is that if you are an author by birth, if you’re destined to be an author, the book will happen by itself. You simply need to touch the nib of your pen to the paper (or the fingers to the keyboard) and the story will flow out of you and find its way, perfect for publication, to the paper or the file.

If that is not true for you (and it won’t be, that I can guarantee), then you’re not a ‘born author.’ If you’re not a ‘born author,’ there’s no point in trying to write at all. There is the occasional author whose first try at writing is already a success (and often it’s their last success because they buy into the ‘born author’ legend), but even that story will be heavily edited before it goes public, so it has been changed after it has flowed out of the writer’s pen or fingers. It has not naturally come out in a perfect shape, it has been reshaped to be in a better condition.

 

Why are we still keeping to this idea such a long time later? The Romantic movement (and neo-classicism) has run its course and is no longer prevalent in art. Other movements and art styles have replaced it and been replaced in turn.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that authors don’t need physical tools the majority of the population doesn’t know how to use. What I mean is that the painter needs to learn how to use a brush and other tools of their trade. The same goes for the sculptor who needs to learn how to use their chisel and hammer and so on. Even the composer needs to be able to read musical notes and composers usually also play several instruments. An author merely needs to be able to put words to paper - a skill anyone who might become an author will have learned already.

The art of writing is not to put words to paper, but to put them to paper in a way that makes them interesting to read. That is what wordcraft is all about.

 

Storytelling is a natural impulse for humans. We understand our world by telling each other stories about it. About the sun and the moon who chase each other around the sky. About gods who wield thunder and lightning. About the atom with its core and the electrons orbiting around it like the planets of a miniature solar system. That doesn’t mean all of those stories are wrong (although some are), but that it is the only way we can understand our surroundings.

Yet, even if every human has the ability to tell stories - and enjoys both telling and consuming them -, that doesn’t mean that if you’re not ‘natural’ at telling perfect stories you shouldn’t do it. Nobody would say that a ‘born athlete’ doesn’t need a lot of training to become the best in their field. Having a talent for running faster than average is something one might be born with. Without hard training, running faster than all the other above-average runners it not going to happen.

Yet, the elitist view that only certain people - only those ‘born authors’ - are meant to write hurts many who could be good or even excellent writers in time, but never get into writing because they didn’t do it perfect the first time around. Like painting, sculpting, and composing, writing takes practice and coaching to become better. ‘Practice makes perfect.’ as they say.

 

There is nothing wrong about practicing, starting with small stories, writing fan-fiction, letting all that ‘bad writing’ out so it can be replaced by better writing. Writing can only get better that way.

There’s also nothing wrong with writing a genre which the elites deem ‘below them.’ Romance is a genre regularly looked down upon (gee, I wonder if the fact that it’s mostly written and consumed by women has something to do with that?), yet it’s the highest-grossing genre overall. Fan-fiction is full of the early works of authors who at one point ditched the pre-made characters of others and began using their own. They practiced with pre-prepared worlds, so they could focus on other parts, and eventually got around to making their own. That’s fine - we know today that fan-fiction has been around for as long as literature has.

There’s also nothing wrong about taking a course in writing or reading something about structures, wordcraft, or the use of tropes. Writing is both an art and a craft. You need the talent for the art, but you need practice to master the craft.

 

Ignore people who tell you that you need to be a ‘born author’ to enjoy writing and produce literature. Nobody is a ‘born author’ above the fact that we all like to tell stories. If you want to write, then write. Get information, read blogs or books about writing, practice your wordcraft. Don’t buy into the hurtful lie that only some people are destined to write, because that’s not true.

Series vs. Stand-Alone Characters

Whenever we read a good book or watch a good movie, there’s the wish to see the main character in another story, the hope for a sequel. Yet, the sequel is often a disappointment. Why is that? Why are some characters good for a series and others only work out once?

 

The easy answer is that there’s a difference between thinking up a character who only has one adventure to go through and thinking up a character who will go through several adventures before you’re done with them.

This doesn’t mean one kind of character is better than the other, it simply means that some will not work for a series or even a single sequel. Their story is told with that one book or movie and bringing them back will do them no good. Others can go on, go through more adventures, without endangering the quality of the sequels.

Quite often, the story for such a stand-alone book or movie is focused on the character growth of the main character, having them overcome a weakness and become a better person for it. There is no point in erasing that change afterwards and doing it all over again. Characters who are part of a series either do not have many changes in their personal arc or they change slowly during the course of the complete series.

 

One example for a stand-alone character in my own books is Alex Dorsey from the novel of the same name. Alex’s personal arc is to grow from the third child of a vampire hunter dynasty into the next leader of the clan. She also has a secondary arc that brings her together with her love interest.

Alex starts the book as the third child - the spare who won’t be needed to lead the clan, neither as the captain, nor as his second-in-command. Those will be the positions of her older brothers. Then her oldest brother is turned into a vampire in a suspicious manner and the other one becomes the new captain, putting her into the future position of ‘second-in-command.’ By the end of the book, Alex is the only surviving child and has taken the mantle of ‘captain’ herself.

Alex’s personal arc is to grow into leaderhood, to overcome her insecurity and grow confident. She needs to understand that she doesn’t have to go through it all alone, that there is a full clan of hunters with her, that her love interest and second-in-command will not desert her. Her romantic arc is to grow together with her love interest, to become acquainted and share more and more personal space. By the end of the book, both arcs are completed.

 

For a series, you may need a character with a lot of issues, so every book can be devoted to one of them. Alternately, you have one big issue which can be resolved in several steps, so the character growth is spread across multiple stories. The third option would be to go the pulp way and have a character which doesn’t grow at all. A lot of classic pulp heroes never really change, nor do their personal situations, but everyone who reads pulp is okay with that.

You can rely more on an outward arc with a series character, too. “Game of Thrones” is all about the question who will sit on the Iron Throne. This is not resolved in one book, naturally, and every books only gives you a little of the answer, taking out characters for good by killing them off and giving others a better or worse chance to sit on the throne. If you do it wisely, then you can draw out such a story for as long as you like. Every book still needs an arc of its own, but the main arc of the series can be dragged out.

 

One example for a series character from my own stories would be Gabrielle Munson from the “Theoretical Necromancy” series. Gabrielle has an arc which goes through all stories to a degree: the missing explanation for how she got the power to raise the dead. With this set in place, every story about her does have its own arc.

Some stories deal massively with her powers, such as “Stray” and “Revenge of the Devil Monks” which both put heavy emphasis on her powers and that she didn’t get them like a regular necromancer. “The Suitor” or “The Tower” on the other hand have little to do with the question where the powers came from, even if they feature as a way of solving problems.

Gabrielle is often motivated by the question of why she has those powers (and what her death and return from it might have to do with it), but just as often by helping her family or getting out of trouble which has come her way for other reasons. Will she one day find out? I honestly don’t know yet.

 

If you’re writing a series, one thing you need to keep an eye out for is consistency. A character can’t have a specific skill in book three, but not in book five - not without good and valid reasons such as an injury which makes it impossible for them to use that skill any longer. Therefore, you will need a ‘bible’ for your story’s characters and other notes - a file or suchlike devoted to keeping all the facts together for easy perusal.

Ask yourself if a skill you want for your character to learn or to have could be useful or story-breaking in the long run. It might be tempting to give your character some strong fighting skill that will help them against the physically powerful villain of book three. By book five, you have a villain who is physically much less intimidating, but very clever. Yet, if your character wanted to, they could just go there and beat that villain up. You can give the villain in book five a few strong bodyguards or you can give the character another skill in book three which will help them defeat the villain and not make them hard to threaten in the future. If uncertain, rather err on the side of caution and make your hero a little weaker.

 

This is also closely related to the ‘power creep’ that can happen in long series. Every time the story reaches a climax, every time the main conflict of a book is resolved, the hero gains more power. In a long-running series like “Dragonball”, this can lead to a character who becomes almost god-like and it may make other characters obsolete.

Fantasy series which come with magic are especially endangered by that power creep. It’s too easy to give your resident mage a powerful spell here and there and mostly forget about them afterwards (see ‘consistency’ above). Over time, that mage becomes immensely powerful, especially if you don’t reuse spells they have already. First of all, the readers might wonder why they don’t use that spell from book three which worked so well against a similar creature. In addition, it becomes harder and harder to come up with an enemy which will really challenge your mage. With all those powerful spells at their disposal, they should be able to solve every problem with a wave of their hand and a few well-chosen magic words. That doesn’t do any wonders for the rising tension.

 

Accept that not every character you imagine will be ready for more than one story. That is not bad per se, but you need to be aware of it. It’s better to give a stand-alone character a strong story to act in than to try and stretch that possible story out over several books or give the character new challenges they’re not meant for just so you can squeeze a sequel or two out of them.

Avoiding Damsels Without Agency

You see, I’ve got this nice lamp here, which I like very much. Yet, every Wednesday, that guy in the black cape steals my lamp and refuses to give it back until I hunt him down and take it back by force. I’m very annoyed about that, as you can probably imagine. I also have a snow globe which another guy who dresses in a black-and-gold leotard tends to steal every other week on Friday, so I have to hunt him down and reclaim it, too. Sometimes, I’m so tempted to let them have the lamp and the snow globe and just buy some new ones…

 

Does that sound strange to you? Probably. Yet, it’s not far from classic adventure and pulp stories where the hapless heroine isn’t much more than a pretty lamp or a snow globe that gets stolen (or kidnapped) by the villain and reclaimed by the hero. If the story is serialized, that might very well happen to the heroine every other day. I’m not surprised that there’s that fan theory that Princess Peach of “Super Mario” fame might actually be having a relationship with Bowser, the villain, as often as he’s kidnapped her.

The ‘pretty lamp’ problem are damsels who have no agency themselves. They could very well be replaced by an object, such as the lamp or the snow globe, and the story wouldn’t change significantly. No sex scene at the end, perhaps, in modern adult literature, but that would be all. Well, perhaps still a sex scene - there’s many, many kinks out there, why not someone who feels sexually attracted to a lamp or a snow globe?

The classic ‘Damsel in Distress’ is a breathing lamp or snow globe. She has no agency, she takes no action at all, she is just ferried around, locked up, or threatened to motivate the hero. In the worst of all cases, she is killed to give the hero some ‘man-pain’ while agonizing over her death. Her whole existence is spun around the motivation of the hero and the actions of the villain, she has no other reason to be there.

 

Does that mean that everyone who is captured by the villain is a damsel, female or even male? No, of course not. At least not the classic, passive model. Sidekicks get caught a lot, too, but they do not just exist for that. They also help the hero, they just can be unlucky (or very unlucky, like a certain Jason Todd). Everyone, including the hero, can be unlucky enough to get caught by the villain.

What sets the sidekick or the plucky orphan or the scientist apart from the classic damsel is agency. They are not just a passive object sitting there and waiting for the next step. They do not only exist to motivate the hero to run some risks. They have a part in the plot that would not work with a lamp or a snow globe. The sidekick will assist the hero before and after the kidnapping, perhaps even find out some important things during it. The plucky orphan will give the hero the all-important information after crawling through a dangerous labyrinth of air ducts. The scientist will withstand the villain and secretly come up with a gadget that helps the hero overcome the villain’s henches. It’s only the classic damsel who sits there in her cell and waits for the next time she has to make an appearance.

 

What is ‘agency,’ then? Agency is actively following a goal. The goal might be simple, like ‘getting out of this lair’ or more complicated like ‘getting an interview with that hero, which is why I will be there when he fights the villain and get captured in the first place.’

A damsel with agency, even if she gets in trouble over it regularly, is so much better than a damsel without agency. As long as your active damsel isn’t stupid enough to walk into the same trap over and over again (which makes it very unlikely to most people - and with good reason), there is no reason why she should not end up in the villain’s hands regularly. After the first few times, the villain would know that threatening her gets him the hero he really wants to get at. Perhaps he also just likes kidnapping the damsel (I actually did once write a short bit of erotica about that).

The important thing about the agency is that it shouldn’t always revolve around the hero. The damsel should have her own reason for going out and risking her life and health. Perhaps she’s a plucky reporter who wants to make it in her profession and always risks it all for a scoop. Perhaps she is searching for her missing father, who is a scientist, and crosses paths with the villain, who kidnapped him. She shouldn’t just blindly follow the hero around and invite snatching by the villain that way - but even that would be better than the classic scenario.

 

Let’s make a more extensive example. One of the classic damsels in pulp is the plucky girl reporter. Reporters were working outside of the house and would naturally get into potentially dangerous situations in the early twentieth century. It would, therefore, be easy enough to explain why the girl reporter could end up in the villain’s hands so often - she was chasing a scoop and got caught by the villain’s henches while doing so. At the same time, the plucky girl reporter also made a very good love interest for the hero. Heroes with a secret identity would be weary of a woman whose goal in life it was to find out who they really were, yet they could still be in love with her.

The girl reporter who has to prove herself (on account of being a sole woman among many men and having to battle misogyny) is likely to run more risks than your average daughter from a good family. She also works in a field where dangers can be common (depending on the kind of articles she writes), so it won’t be too hard for the author to get her in trouble every week or month in a serialized format.

If the girl reporter gets snatched by the henches while following them, it also has nothing to do with the hero - it’s her own doing that got her captured. If this means the hero is going to help her get out of it, then that’s a lot better than getting kidnapped from her nice home in the good part of town just so the hero will come to save her.

 

‘Just so the hero will come to save her’ is never a good reason for endangering someone. Of course, a human life at stake will raise the tension of any story wonderfully. A human life extinguished (the logical next step when the hero gets too used to having their damsel kidnapped) will raise the stakes even more. Yet, having a character who only exists for that, with no agency and no goals of (usually) her own is not good. If you have to do it that way, why not try something along the line of the damsel wanting the hero to rescue her and putting herself in danger because of that?

This doesn’t mean that a damsel has to rescue herself. It just means that she should be active, even after capture. She can very well try to break out of her cell, but fail at it. Get out and get caught again. Gather information while the villain is walking around and giving orders. There are many ways in which the rescue of a damsel can pay off for the hero beyond a ‘Happily Ever After’ or a steamy night.

 

Avoid the cliché classic ‘Damsel in Distress’ who can be replaced with an inanimate object without any real changes to the story. She’s been around so often that it’s hard to do something new with her. You can still damsel people, if you need to, but make sure they have their agency and are not just passively sitting around. And while you’re at it, leave my lamp and my snow globe alone! I have other things to do on Wednesdays and Fridays!