Brilliant Disguise

 I hadn’t planned on writing Brilliant Disguise.  I’m not much of a direct sequel person.  I’ve hardly ever found them to be as good as the original story (Empire Strikes Back notwithstanding and okay, sometimes a third installment is improved upon–Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, anyone?).  So when I wrote The Good Thief, to me, that was it.  James and Scotlyn’s story was finished.  But then someone told me it ended on a mysterious note.  Another asked me when the sequel was to come out.  So forth and so on.  I’ve had that feeling before.  I’ll read or watch something and feel that intense craving to read or see more.  When we’re drawn into a story, we don’t want it to end.  We want to go on with the characters, to see what happens next.  And my readers wanted to know what happened to James and Scotlyn after The Good Thief.   

I went back and forth on this thought as I moved forward with working on a new story.  What did happen to them after The Good Thief?  The more I thought about that and the more I heard my readers, the more I wanted to know.  So I did the first thing I usually do in my writing process: nothing.  

An idea comes organically through characters for me.  I see them first, then hear them.  If James and Scotlyn had more to their story, they’d tell me.  I just had to sit back and listen.  I wasn’t going to force an idea (what’s wrong with many sequels).  

For a long time, they were quiet.  Oftentimes, when they are, it’s because the story is painful to tell.  But one day, Scotlyn started to speak through a few songs I happened to hear: “I Knew You Were Waiting” (George Michael and Aretha Franklin), “Waiting for a Star to Fall” (Boy Meets Girl), “I Will Wait” (Hootie & the Blowfish).

See a theme? 

Scotlyn promised to wait for James, no matter what, at the end of The Good Thief.  And waiting for someone, especially for someone completing a dangerous, deadly job, can be hell.  As I explored that in the first several pages, another character grabbed at the mike, wanting attention: an old boyfriend of Scotlyn’s mentioned in The Good Thief.  I didn’t like Raylan Hunt.  But he had something to say.  As unpredictable as he was tenacious, he wanted Scotlyn back no matter what.  No one was going to stop him.  And as James finally made his way front and center in this circle of characters, speaking quietly in that low voice of his, I knew what he had to say was going to be no picnic.  And it wasn’t.  Raylan was a criminal and the FBI needed him and Scotlyn (the only woman Raylan has ever loved) to go undercover to see what they could find out.  I didn’t know how it would turn out, but I knew that as the months passed and their story unfolded, Raylan’s obsessions and James’s intense love for Scotlyn would lead to a climax I’m not sure any one of them would survive.