Now available: The Secret of Harmony Reed volume III (Patreon)

The Secret of Harmony Reed Volume III: Same Struggles is now available on Amazon! This book is my first trilogy, and I have to say it feels pretty amazing to have completed it. It's a big day for me, and, I dare say, a big day for world literature as a whole.

FINE, maybe it's just a big day for me. Anyway, it wound up being a pretty major undertaking. It's significantly longer than the first two books combined, and honestly, some parts of it are still faster-paced than I wanted them. It picks up right where New Tricks left off, and poor Harmony does her (ig)noble best to make something of the mess her life has become. I've attached a free copy of Volume I: Old Habits, so if you never got into it but are curious to check it out before sinking $ into it, have at it! $20+ patrons will receive their copy in the subsequent post.

First off, what's next? I'm gonna do a little commission work right off, and get an ending for the If You Want short story I shared a couple weeks back. Then, I'm returning to This Is Our Story (TIOS). It got a really positive response and I had a ton of fun writing it and have a lot of fun and (hopefully) clever ideas for Conner and his peeps, and I want to keep the good times rolling for those wacky Northside Nighthawks. I am *not* planning on going full-focus on it like I did with TSoHR 3, so you can count on the occasional commission or random fun piece while I go. (More than usual of the latter, since, thanks to those fuckwits at patreon, I lost 30% of my revenue overnight and need to remind the world I exist -- not that anyone's bitter. /endrant)

For those of you who are interested in the background and craft of things, I'm gonna ramble a bit about Harmony Reed. There will be some spoilers, so if you're curious, maybe come back after you've checked out the new book.

A while back, I had an idea for what I thought would be a fun short story - what if somebody was one of those mind-controlled sex slaves you're always reading about, and one day, their master just... died? I imagined it originally as a semi-humorous piece, exploring the odd yearnings and social quirks of someone steeped in that world trying to adjust to ours. Instead, we got the almost-never humorous Harmony Reed. I don't know at what point it changed in my head; I think as I started trying to write a character instead of a premise, it revealed a bit of her humanity.

I've said before that a lot of my method is creating characters, giving a few rules to their world, and recording what they do. I'm seldom prescriptive beyond the most macro aspects, and not always even then. I remember all the flak I got when Emily died in Tolerance, and I remember sharing a lot of the sadness. I made an Emily, made an Ashley, and sure enough that bitch killed her, because it's what she would do. I didn't plan it in advance, but once I'd seen her do it, I knew it was what had to happen.

Harmony is a major victim of this tendency of mine. (To say nothing of the myriad other circumstances she's a victim of.) When I re-read her stories, I sometimes step back and criticize myself for the way her commitment to her submissive tendencies waxes and wanes. In one chapter she's pining for Master and celebrating his amazitude, and in the next, she shares a passage where she attempted to murder him. So does she love him, or hate him, or what?

While I don't want to weigh in on the question of whether people are basically simple or usually complex, I definitely believe that our emotions are the latter. It's that part of me that was very active in Harmony's journey. The way we can hate and love people at the same time, how we can knowingly embrace our worst impulses. That we can be so mad at someone else we'll pull our own hair out. (That'll show 'em.) I looked at Harmony and saw someone who knew exactly how she'd been used and abused, but was also trying to survive that trauma and cope the best she can. There's a passage in TSoHR 3 where Dr. Kovacs asks her why she's giving in, and she counters whether he'd ask someone whose legs had been crippled why they were "giving in" to a wheelchair. 

The Harmony Reed series is a good deal bleaker than most of my writing, I think. Tolerance/The Tolerant had a fair amount of whimsy in DJ's exploration of his power; My New Girlfriend gets its happy ending and many a fuzzy moment leading up to it; the Friend Zone series is nothing but a guy giggling as he gives the finger to some people who've annoyed him. (Oh Todd, you rapscallion.) While I gave some thought to whether I could make Harmony's final voyage something more uplifting, I ultimately decided that I wanted to keep the series about who Harmony really is: a struggling victim of circumstances trying to adjust so she can have what happiness is left for her. Which, I know, isn't Fun. It can be hot, sometimes, because of her particular vision for her happiness, but I don't think it's often a thing I'd look on as a friend and go "good call, Harmony, keep doing what you're doing."

At the same time, I don't generally approach her with pity. The Bad Thing is something that *happened*, not something that is *happening*. The series begins with the worst of the damage done and over. When we see flashbacks to the ranch, it's there that we see a mutilated psyche, basking in pain and humiliation, craving abuse, throwing herself at a man who, as she finally begins to see by the end, was really just some asshole with a god complex and an unhealthy attitude toward women. In the present, Harmony's actually mostly normal. She goes to work, hangs out with friends, says hi to her neighbors in passing. But beneath it all is the effects of that trauma.

A quick note on my own experiences with trauma: A couple years back, I worked at a school in a very impoverished area, and I got real exposure to the lives of people living with trauma. Most of my students had family members in prison (often fathers or brothers); many weren't given food at home; some were homeless; many were using drugs or being denied beneficial drugs that they sorely needed. I saw the ways it makes them act out, the self-destructive and outwardly destructive impulses it engenders, how much harder it makes creating and maintaining stable and healthy relationships. In effect, their trauma helped breed an atmosphere that goes on to create more trauma. I'm not ashamed to say I didn't last long there, and I am filled with awe and gratitude for all those people in the world working to help trauma survivors recover.

Back to Harmony. She has trauma of an atypical sort - sexual and psychological issues, problems with self-worth, need for validation, and for all her insistence that she's immune to fear, there's clearly a deep anxiety surrounding the feeling of abandonment/betrayal by her family, and the potential loss of the new family she's found in her social circle. If I'm in this book at all, it's as David Kovacs, the mild-mannered oddjob who wants to help this poor creature but clearly doesn't know how. And that's how I felt writing it. How do you help someone whose obvious remedy is, essentially, self-nullifying? In the end, I think his "help" is mostly being a sounding board for her, a reminder that her experiences aren't universal, and not everyone is looking at her for their own benefit.

So, all that to say, I think this series is, aside from hopefully being an interesting/arousing diversion, my odd way of doing a little treatise on coping with the effects of trauma. I like that Harmony's ultimate solution isn't to move on, shut off her libido, get a boyfriend/husband, live the typical life. She's a little bit broken, and for her, the best solution is to take ownership of her own breakage. 

As to to the craft of it all, I almost forgot to tack on that epilogue, and for me, it's my stylistically favorite part of the series. (Or maybe tied for favorite. One sec.) Once I sat down to actually produce Harmony Reed as the serious character she was and not "hee hee I forgot I'm not sposed ta fuck my landlord!" like I originally envisioned, my other plan was to show that she's really fucking bad at keeping her secret. For crying out loud, it's mid-way through book 1 before her own sexual needs find her strip-teasing on her balcony. It was clear someone with that much baggage simply can't manage all that without having it spill all over everything, and so the story became the "secret" of Harmony Reed.

You may or may not have noticed that, even aside from the book being written first person, Harmony frequently breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader directly. The opening line of book 1 reads: "My name is Harmony Reed, and I’m going to tell you a secret." I'm not going to pretend I had the whole thing sketched out in advance, but I knew my ending was going to have her sitting down and telling "you" (whoever you are) everything she's telling you. In effect, the ending of book 3 ("Oh yeah? What's that?") forms the series neatly into a circle, and around we go. I wanted to cheat a little and invite the reader to partake in the story as one of Harmony Reed's beneficiaries. So if you read through and ever thought, "man, I totally wanna bang this chick," that's basically the offer implicit in it all along. You helped talk her through her sob story; you earned it.

My other favorite section was a bit longer, and that's chapter five of this last book. I believe it's the first time we ever get a glimpse of Harmony Reed as a normal, healthy person, the first flashback where she's sitting in her car in the summer of 2013, singing (badly) along with Taylor Swift. It did a lot for me to highlight who I was really dealing with, the glimpse of her as a Before, providing a frame for comparison to the After we see throughout. Seeing her as a normal person doing normal things, then seeing the pain and confusion and uninvited pleasure of her awakening at the ranch, then the height of her corruption at a point in which she is so damaged that the memory of being whole is upsetting to her. By which point, it's a lot easier to see the ultimate conflict of the series, whether she can have the strength to commit to her own healing.

So yeah. Harmony Reed isn't fun. She's not especially friendly (triggers notwithstanding), wouldn't try to pretend she's the smartest girl in the room, and prone to vanity (though who could blame her). It's hard to be friends with her, and you never know when or how she's going to blow up, and whether it's going to be awesome or horrible. She's a trauma victim, and doing the hardest thing of all, trying to find a means of coping with a world that doesn't extend people a lot of pity or assistance. Which makes her a lot more human than most of the characters I write, and for me, that's why I love her, and why I listened to her tell me her story over a whiskey sour at the Eclipse.

Now, on to TIOS, and we'll try to have a little more fun and maybe worry a bit less about the foibles of human nature. Maybe. :)