It's a day in... and already I have to rant!

I have gotten a lot of messages and some seriously fired up responses about killing off characters in the fifth installment of the SHMC series. Some of the reviews that have been left have been pretty entertaining, some of them have been downright special, but all of them have the same theme: “Oh my God! You wretched bitch! How could you!?”

Well! Oh my God! If you only knew what I had to go through to write Fractured & Formidable this way, some of you might be a little more understanding. It was bad, ladies and gentlemen, it was really bad. I argued with the specific character for weeks. The secondary characters I was a bit meh about, but the main character, oh good lord the knockdown, drag out, internal screaming matches inside my head were to a level that I came down with some very real physical headaches.

To give you an idea, I wrote Fractured & Formidable in its entirety and I wrote it so the character in question lived… I really did! Then I got half way through the next and final book in the SHMC series and had to come to a screeching halt because the character in question put their foot down. I went back to Fractured & Formidable and ripped out the entire back half of the book. When I say the entire back half I mean I deleted chapters nineteen through thirty-two, the only thing that got saved was the epilogue. I then rewrote the entire back half of the book according to the character’s wishes and what do you know? The book came out so much better for it.

Then, not even going to lie, I spent a week on my couch in my pajamas barely talking to my fiancé while he kept the Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream coming. If he judged, he did it silently and with no outward signs he was doing so. That’s love, people.

Unfortunately, my day job wouldn’t let me wear the black arm band for a month in remembrance but what the fuck do they know about it anyways? I was in mourning and, to be completely honest, I still haven’t found all of the pieces of my broken heart.  It may have killed a part of y’all to read it, but these guys live in my heart and in my head twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To suddenly have that voice go silent, to never hear from them again… then to know and be the only one to know for months and months and months before I could release it, suffering in silence, knowing how many people I was about to devastate…

Yeah, I understand you might be angry, hurt and heartbroken but does that really necessitate a one star review?

Seriously. Just wondering.