One of the characters, Cam from BE MINE FOREVER, book 3 in my debut trilogy, is a very special character to me. He has always been my favorite of the BENNETT series. I know many readers felt the exact opposite, especially in books 1 and 2. And I get it. Completely. He made some real jerk moves in the first part of the series. I guess what I loved were the things the readers didn’t know about him yet. How tender and affectionate he could be. How much of a reprieve his art had been from the truly horrid existence of his childhood. The sexual abuse he had suffered and how it shaped him. Made him desperate enough for affirmation, affection, acceptance to marry a girl he didn’t love in the right way. To marry a girl he suspected loved his best friend.
So, yeah. There were things I knew that readers didn’t know yet.
I don’t see a lot of sexually abused heroes in romance, but I knew a few writers who had tackled this challenging topic. I talked with them and with the folks from 1in6, a national organization helping male sex abuse survivors for the piece I wrote for USA Today. The response was overwhelming. It was shared in so many places. At one point, a friend tagged me on a comment on Facebook. When I went to check it out, she was posting in a thread Anne Rice had posted about my article. She called it interesting and encouraged her followers to read it. Yeah, that Anne Rice. Um…freak out.
I guess what I’m saying is that the article hit a nerve for many. Resonated with many. I hope, maybe, helps some who may have hesitated talking about their abuse. It was an article about sexually abused males in romantic fiction, but never have I been more conscious that the fiction I created was someone’s reality than when I wrote that piece.
Find the article HERE. Writing this helped me understand Cam even better. Maybe it will do the same for you. If you haven’t read BMF, all the links are below. 🙂
