My first novel, Jaded, is due out from Breathless Press soon. Much like the title suggests, the main character Isabella is a jaded gal. She’s had really bad luck in love — god, who hasn’t? — and has done some soul searching that leads her to completely eschew men. As she’s adjusting to the new lifestyle, something her family just doesn’t understand or accept, here comes Luke Peterson, a totally badass hunkathon on repeat who completely challenges both Isabella’s decision to stay single and her ideas about what a healthy relationship looks like.
This situation is something a lot of women can relate to (the challenges to our ideas, that is — it’s not actually everyday hunks show up at our doors for remodeling projects, right?), and one that intensely interests me as both a human being and an author. Life tends to get us jaded, especially when we continually want something and it seems to be kept from us, or never seems to work out.
But the point behind Jaded is that a lot of times what we think we want in life turns out to be a little off. Sometimes, our wants and desires end up in a rut — we keep searching for the same thing, the same style, the same type of guy, thinking that this time will be the time it works out, for whatever reason. Our routines and comfort zones tend to lead us toward themes, even in what we want and desire. Leaps outside of that box often yield unexpected results. Luke is nothing like what Isabella normally goes for. They’re from different walks of life, with VERY different ideas about relationships and love. But something happens — the spark, the jarring event, the collision of energy, just the right sequence of moments, whatever it is — and they find themselves overturning old ideals and rewriting their visions of the future.
I wrote Jaded because I’ve been where Isabella is at the beginning of the novel: jaded, bitter, still in love with love but utterly convinced it’s just not in the cards. How we each overcome this sentiment is entirely personal. Maybe we don’t. Maybe it takes a long time. But a lot of times it takes a degree of vulnerability that our jaded sides just don’t want to offer. It’s hard to define what that process is like across the board.
What Isabella comes to learn, as many of us have and are learning and will learn, is that life often has surprises in store for us, and a very, very uncanny way of showing us that what we don’t always know best, even in love and romance.
