Hi everyone as part of Hallowread I have Author L.M. Pruitt with me on the blog today with a guest post.

Guest Post

Addiction

I’m going to start this by linking to another blog, Fangs for the Fantasy. Take a moment to go and read their post because it’s fascinating and eye-opening. At least it was for me—it played a huge part in forming the story arc of LOST.

When I started doing research for LOST, I mainly focused on P.T.S.D—after all, Joanne and the other characters were the only survivors of the Siege of Calais, which pretty much turned into wholesale slaughter. I didn’t want to shy away from the ugliness of the aftermath, even if it meant the characters becoming more than a little unlikeable. Early on I found overlapping stories of addiction and P.T.S.D. but I never gave serious thought to making addiction a major plot point. I write romance—not mystery or urban fantasy. Romance. People don’t pick my books up expecting to read about addiction and withdrawal and all sorts of other horrible things.

Then I found the article above. So I stepped back a moment and started thinking. And I realized I didn’t want to write what was comfortable and expected. I wanted to write what was real and important and right, both for the story and the characters and for the world we live in.

So LOST has addiction. It has withdrawal. It has ugliness and heartbreak. All of that is there for a reason—honesty. Honesty to our reality and honesty to the reality the characters live in.

I was worried I wouldn’t succeed. I was worried I would fail because this isn’t something I have any experience with. When I sent out the chapters dealing with the main character’s detox, I asked my beta readers to be brutal and thorough—if they spotted any moment where something rang untrue, to tell me. They reached out to me with their own experiences and the experiences of people in their lives who have gone through addiction and withdrawal—in short they were amazing.

LOST was, by far, the hardest book I have ever written. And I think, in the end, it will be one of the books I’m most proud of.

AUTHOR BIO

L.M. Pruitt has been reading and writing for as long as she can remember. A native of Florida with a love of New Orleans, she has the uncanny ability to find humor in most things and would probably kill a plastic plant. She knows this because she's killed bamboo. Twice. She is the author of the Jude Magdalyn series, Moon Rising series, and Taken: A Frankie Post Novel. Winged is the first book in a six part series about the choice one woman makes after she dies. Ms. Pruitt continues to make her home in Florida in spite of the heat and mosquitos and shares her home with two cats--one of them smart, the other not so much.

WINGED BLURB

I fell from the Talmadge Bridge the week before I turned thirty.

I was given a choice: Go to Heaven. Go back to my life in Savannah. Or spend eternity fighting evil under the direction of the archangels.

I chose the demons--and the angels.

I chose the Winged.