5 Steps to Villainy with author, @JoGrafford #contemporaryromance #RB4U

(Photo Credit: Hacker by Salvatore Vuono at FreeDigitalPhotos)

Darth Vader (Star Wars), Terminator T-800 (Terminator), Police Inspector Javert (Les Miserables), the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robin Hood), the King Slayer (Game of Thrones), and the list goes on.

What is it about these villains that reaches across the TV screen (or the e-reader or novel in our hands) and completely grabs us by the throat? What it is that makes us remember them long after the credits have finished rolling?

1.       The villains we love to hate are truly despicable. Bad things happen to good people when these guys and gals show up. Innocent people get hurt. Manipulation. Hidden agendas. War. Catastrophe. Torture. Punishment. Collateral damage. Mass destruction. Death. They cross the line, do the unforgiveable, and force us face our worst fears.

2.       We see where they went wrong. Many villains aren’t just warped from birth. They have a past. Sometimes an all-too familiar one. Difficult childhoods. Unfair circumstances. Pain. Abuse. Tragedy. Bad luck. Things many of us have dealt with ourselves. Things that often lead to poor choices and a whole lifetime of ill consequences. We sometimes look at these villains and say, “That could have been me, if it weren’t for…”

3.       We see ways to redeem them even if they don’t want to be redeemed. We wonder why they refuse to take advantage of second chances. Or third chances. Or fourth. Why they don’t stop and cut their losses. Pay their dues. Turn over a new leaf. Reach for the olive branch. There are so many opportunities to change a person’s stars in a single lifetime. But these villains refuse. Or can’t. Or won’t. And it drives us crazy, because they could. But don’t.

4.       We occasionally glimpse a shred of their humanity (or former humanity). As much as we don’t want to like them, sometimes we do. Almost. Or a lot. Because once in a while, they make us laugh or sympathize or relate. How dare they!

5.       We experience emotion at their demise. Even though they deserve what they get at the end, deserve to lose, deserve to spend the rest of their miserable days behind bars, or even deserve to die…a part of us hurts when they do. Because somewhere along the way, we caught a glimpse of what they could have, would have, might have been. If only…

What do YOU love to hate about your favorite villains?

In my upcoming release, DESIGNED FOR YOU, you’ll meet one of our villains on the first page. In the first sentence, actually . A man who works from the shadows and calls himself XX. A man who my entrepreneurial interior designer, Jillian Lang, refuses to take seriously. At first.

If your reader senses are tingling, join us for the heart-pounding, fast-paced ride of your life. Those who reserve their pre-order copy before our April 19 release date get to do so for a 70% discount off regular price.

Happy reading!

—Jo

BOOK INFORMATION

TITLE – Designed For You

SERIES (& Book #) – For You Series, Book #1

AUTHOR – Jo Grafford

GENRE – Contemporary Romance

PUBLICATION DATE – April 19, 2016

LENGTH (Pages/# Words) – 86,000 words

PUBLISHER –  JG Press

COVER ARTIST – JG Press

Despite a string of personal tragedies and setbacks, Jillian Lang's interior design company is an enormous success. If she doesn't count the cyber stalker who hounds her daily…

Her new office manager, Holland Sparks, steps to the plate, shielding her from the threatening calls and emails, while steadily chipping away at the many barriers she’s erected to shield her heart.

When the stalker suddenly moves his game from the cyber world to the real world, Jillian discovers no one in her immediate circle is exactly who or what he claims to be. Not her landlord. Not even her family.

Will Holland be the one man she can turn to, or will his own secrets be reason enough to scrap her designs on the man of her dreams?

BUY LINKS

AMAZON KINDLE US – http://amzn.com/B01AU8SEAO

AMAZON KINDLE CA –  http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01AU8SEAO

AMAZON KINDLE UK – http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01AU8SEAO

BARNES & NOBLES NOOK – http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/designed-for-you-jo-grafford/1123296144?ean=2940152837261#productInfoTabs

ITUNES – https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/designed-for-you/id1077543099?ls=1&mt=11

KOBO - https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/designed-for-you

AUTHOR BIO

An award-winning author from St. Louis, Missouri, Jo has served as a corporate trainer, junior college finance instructor, and high school business teacher. Along the way, she discovered the only thing she enjoys as much as teaching is writing. Especially writing romance!

In her stories, the stakes are always high and there's nothing her heroes won't risk for the brilliant, sassy women they love.

A typical day finds her with her laptop balanced on her knees, a caffeinated beverage within reach, and a cat snoozing nearby who dreams of taking over the world.

Jo writes across the genres and is presently writing three series:

·         For You Series - heart pounding contemporary romantic suspense

·         Lost Colony Series - the epic historical saga of the Lost Colonists of Roanoke Island

·         Vikings Saga - a collection of fantasy novellas

When Jo's not writing romance, she's reading it. She adores alpha males, strong-minded women, humorous sidekicks, diversity, Vikings, dashing lords, vampires, zombies, cyborgs...you get the idea.

She loves to stay in touch with readers on Facebook, Twitter, BookBub, and Amazon. Plus you can read free chapters of all her books on Wattpad. To receive a free copy of one of her bestselling stories, visit JoGrafford.com to sign up for her newsletter.

AUTHOR FOLLOW LINKS 

AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE –  http://www.amazon.com/Jo-Grafford/e/B00G56XKS2/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

WEBSITE / BLOG – www.JoGrafford.com

FACEBOOK – www.facebook.com/JoGraffordAuthor

TWITTER – www.twitter.com/JoGrafford

GOOGLE+ – https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JoGrafford/posts

PINTEREST – https://de.pinterest.com/JoGrafford/

GOODREADS – https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7360736.Jo_Grafford

OTHERS – WattPad - https://www.wattpad.com/user/JoGrafford

Light and Shadow ~ Rose Anderson

My son and I talk writing styles all the time, for he too is an author. When he was a boy, we studied Shakespeare hidden in movies together. He's a grown man now, and his tastes have changed.  It took him five years to convince me to watch Breaking Bad. I hadn't planned to watch this show. The topic of a meth-cooking, drug-riddled world of destroyed lives is hardly my choice for leisure entertainment. He says it's worth my time because of the “writing genius” involved and because he wanted me to see the anti-hero in action. Of course I have the whole hero thing nailed down in my mind, all of my novels have them. But an anti-hero? I had no clear picture in my head to go by, none that I was aware of anyway. 

The World English Dictionary defines the anti-hero as a central character in a novel, play, etc, who lacks the traditional heroic virtues. 

Oh, I knew that. I just didn't realize it had a name. It’s a character you find yourself rooting for regardless of their dubious qualities. Robert Louis Stevenson's Long John Silver is one of these anti-heroes. So are Scarlett O’Hara, Severus Snape, and Captain Jack Sparrow. They’re sort of nebulous-personality persons. You can't quite decide if they're good or bad, but somehow they strike a chord and you mysteriously end up cheering for them. 

Okay, if heroes are on one side of the character spectrum, and anti-heroes in that vague gray area, what about those not so nebulous persons? What about villains? My Exquisite Quills group recently had a discussion that peered into those dark cobwebby corners of our imagination where story villains linger. Very interesting.

I personally love crafting villains, especially sociopathic bad guys who create story conflict that must be overcome in the most interesting ways possible.  Sociopaths, by definition, are only interested in their personal needs and desires, without concern for the effects of their behavior on others. I can write that!

As a reader, I find such characters fascinating. Scarlett O'Hara is far more complex than her southern belle persona suggests. She's obviously a sociopath as well as an anti-hero. That's one of the things I love about writing these types of characters -- their complexity. Super villain Professor Moriarty is an intellectual match for Sherlock Holmes, the greatest analytical mind in the Victorian world. Now combine that literary fact of Moriarty with the definition of sociopath and you can see how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created an unforgettable foe.

As a writer, I find complex bad guys allow for a deeper internal monologue, and I'll leave this door open just a crack to show the reader a glimpse into my villain's mind to see the whys. My goal is to inspire a smidge of sympathy. Here are three of my most complex villains. Readers occasionally tell me they almost feel sorry for them...almost. 

Loving Leonardo: Conte Acario Bruno is a man born to privilege and raised on the attitude that servants, and other "lesser" people around him,  were merely property on par with the horses in the stables. Through his thoughts, the reader gets to see how that life of imbalances made the obsessive man he became. He finds love, a fanatical one-sided love, but the reader can see it's genuine on his part.

The Witchy Wolf and the Wendigo saga: Eluwilussit, aka Eli, is one of the story's ancient Native American shaman. As a true "I want what I want" sociopath, he just kept digging a deeper hole for himself with every evil deed and made himself the monster he came to be. The deeds meant nothing to him, and always, the end justified the means. Though there are far too many poor choices to possibly make amends for, his greatest desire is to return to the spirit world to say he's sorry things happened the way they did. You can see his sociopath's mind in this statement. He's not sorry HE did something. He's sorry things happened the way they did. His apology would sound like, "I'm sorry you made me do this." 

In my 5-book, 500k, as yet unnamed magnum opus (or MO for short), I’ve written an evil genius named Adrian Doyle. I don't know how it happened, but this guy ended up with such a depth of personality he surprised me. When the time comes, Adrian should meet his end in the MO’s own version of Reichenbach Falls the way Professor Moriarty did when he wrestled Sherlock Holmes and both went over the cateract. After emotionally investing in Adrian Doyle as a supreme villain, I’m sure my readers would expect nothing less.
 
I'm currently writing my first female villain. She too has her issues!

I believe these characters are necessary if one is writing true heroes. They're the other side of the coin...the dark side, the shadow. Example: Diana Gabaldon, one of my favorite authors, wrote such a villain in Black Jack Randall of the Outlander story. Each scene with the man is both repellant and fascinating. From A to Z, no matter what that man inflicted on the other characters, I couldn't look away. Some things were truly revolting. Oddly, I saw the point of this extreme because Diana’s Jamie Frasier is, in my opinion, an example of the perfect hero – self-sacrificing, loyal, courageous, noble, intelligent, wise etc. The truly good character needs the truly bad character to create a counterbalance. In other words, there is no light if the dark doesn't exist to make a distinction.

Rose is multi-published award-winning author and dilettante who loves great conversation and learning interesting things to weave into stories. She lives with her family and small menagerie amid oak groves and prairie in the rolling glacial hills of the upper mid-west.  
 
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VILLAINS-HOW WE LOVE THEM

VILLIANS-HOW WE LOVE THEM


Who doesn’t love a villain? I love villains, both to read about and to write, especially to write. We authors can take our hidden aggressions out on our villains, make them do things we’d never do.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the heroes in my books. Really love them, as in fall in love with each one: Tom, Logan, Dominic, Nick, Daniel, Aiden, and all the heroes in my short stories.

Our romance heroes are larger than life - sexy, sweet, tortured, tough, sensitive - but always willing to sacrifice all for the women they love.

Not so with villains. Villains are out for themselves only. They care only about what others can do for them. What makes villains such fun to write is that we can project all sorts of nasty attributes to a villain and get away with it.

However, the best villains aren’t pure evil but multi-dimensional and contain enough humanity that the reader can say, “You know, he’s really bad, but I sort of understand why he’s doing what he does.”

On some level, we all know we have the capacity to slip into the darkness. Most of us don’t, of course. The villains are the ones who slipped. We look at them with a mixture of relief and gratitude, and a little bit of smugness. Thank God we have enough sense and strength to fight the darkness, we say.

Each of us has several sides to our personality, mostly good, some maybe not so good. The most well-known example of good versus evil is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A classic case of split personality where both decency and wickedness reside in the same person. This story has fascinated readers since Robert Louis Stevenson published it in 1886. Why does it fascinate? Because we can all relate to the fight within us, the fight between good and bad.

Remember the Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk splits into two distinct personalities - one wimpy, one horrific? A masterpiece.

Villains, no matter how evil, should have that glimmer of humanness that shows through at times. We can relate to a villain who is conflicted because we understand him and, on some level, sympathize.

I’ve never seen the TV show, “True Blood,” although I hear it’s good. I’m afraid of vampires which is why I don’t watch it. When I was talking with one of my writer friends about doing a blog article on villains, she mentioned Eric, the tall blond vampire on “True Blood,” as an excellent example of a conflicted villain. He wants the heroine Sookie for himself, and he’s contemptuous of humans. But he has a tender side. He cries tears of blood for his maker. Viewers watch him and wonder if the love of a good woman can redeem him. But then he’ll turn around and do something twisted, like when he tricked Sookie into taking some of his blood. Good conflict and suspense that keep people glued to the TV or to a book.

I’ve tried to give my villain characters some redeemable values. The villain in my romantic suspense, “Logan’s Redemption,” is out to kill my heroine and destroy her father. But in his mind, he’s feels he’s justified. Decent people don’t commit murder to settle scores. But we like to read about others who take that drastic step. It allows us to touch our dark sides vicariously and to know we’re better than someone who commits evil.

The villains in my romantic suspense novella, “Murder, Mi Amore,” don’t have many redeeming values. These villains are very nasty people, motivated to find a stolen diamond before some even nastier terrorists come after them. I made them bad and violent, driven only by the real human desires for money and power, and propelled by fear and self-preservation.

The villain in my paranormal romance, “Cursed Mates,” is a demon. Now, that’s about as evil as you can get. But this demon fell from grace and made a bargain with the devil because of his love for a lady. As a demon, he cursed his political and love rival to life as a werewolf. My demon loved this lady so much that 500 years later, he’s still tortured by her rejection and determined to kill the man who stole her from him. I tried to give him a flicker of humanity, to make him multi-dimensional. My werewolf hero in that story is dark and tormented too. He’s fought for 500 years to stave off the darkness in his soul, and he’s slipping, but he continues the fight. The demon gave in to the darkness. Most of us, like my werewolf hero, fight the shadows. Still, we love reading about the ones who slipped into the abyss.

Can you think of some classic baddies you’ve loved despite yourself?