Deadly Women, Dangerous Romance

Jun 17, 2021 | 2020 Summer - Connections

By MB Austin

The Storm Fronts series explores the perilous lives, heartpounding adventures, and complicated love story of two women in a future world complete with space travel, Talents (empaths, precognition, telekinesis, etc.), and mercenaries seeking to create super-soldiers. Vick Corren provides a living test case, becoming VC1 after an accident requires various parts of her body, including sixty-three percent of her brain, be replaced with sophisticated biotech. Only empath Kelly, hired by the corporation to help VC1 regulate her emotions, treats Vick as a human equal, a friend and colleague. Anything more endangers them both.

Q&A with author Elle E. Ire

Q: I love your tag line, “Deadly Women, Dangerous Romance.” It certainly fits the Storm Fronts series! How did you come up with it? Does it reflect all your work as well?

A: I’m so glad you like it! Honestly, it just came to me. I had noticed a few other authors with tag lines and I liked the concept. This one seemed to encompass pretty much everything that I write; so yes, it does reflect all of my work. I always feature powerful female characters who are capable of killing to survive, even if they’re reluctant to do so. This trait makes having any kind of romance with them a very dangerous prospect indeed. And it creates lots of action, tension, and angst between the romantic leads, all of which I love to write. I love protagonists who are heroes with a dark side, who question their morals and ethics, who do what must be done but suffer from having to do it. And exploring the women who can love them despite all this also fascinates me. Their relationships are never easy and yet they keep fighting for those relationships; I think that’s what makes the pairings work to hold a reader’s interest.

Q: Vick’s experience of losing memories, her sense of self, and the ability to regulate emotion so accurately reflects the visceral experience of many trauma survivors, particularly those with brain injuries. How did you achieve such verisimilitude?

A: The quick answer is that I love this type of character—the tormented soul, the one who has been dropped into hell and fought her way back but doesn’t quite know if she made it out.

I am drawn to books, TV series, and films that feature this character type, so I have consumed tons of media featuring these sorts of survivors and I tend to soak up the details and then incorporate them in my own way with my own characters.

The longer answer is that I began writing the character of Vick Corren when I was still in college. To give you some perspective, I am fifty years old, so it has been a long time since I first imagined her. She has been through multiple incarnations, been part of fanfiction that no one will ever see, had an entire novel written about her that was eventually scrapped. I have worked, reworked, and worked again with this one character for about thirty years. In my head, I have put her through every type of trauma and disaster, then worked through her actions, reactions, and even dialogue to play with how she would view herself and how she would react to each scenario. When I wrote the Storm Fronts series, I had thirty years of material to draw from. Vick is, without a doubt, the most complicated and complex character I have ever worked with. I think having amassed so much background knowledge about her, most of which never makes it into a book, adds to the realism of her overall persona in the series.

Q: My favorite science fiction makes me examine what it means to be human. Vick struggles to share Kelly’s faith that she is still human, while being treated as if she is a machine by others. Although her gender and sexuality are not an issue in this future society, her experience of being othered and her heroic effort to form and hold onto a healthy sense of self feels so relevant to this real world, in many times and cultures. Did you plan for the story to resonate with readers who are queer, non-binary, or trans, or perhaps have an intersectional identity that their families/peers/strangers don’t readily understand and accept?

A: Well, to begin with, Vick Corren was originally straight. Remember that novel I first wrote about her [above]? Yeah, she was entirely straight and had no love interests at all. This was, in no small part, due to the fact that I had not come to terms with my own sexuality (I am bisexual), and therefore could not bring myself to make Vick bisexual as well even though my internal author voice was telling me that Vick was not only bisexual but needed a female romantic interest to help balance her emotionally. Her potential romantic interests came out in my head when I was imagining her, but they never made it to the page.

When that first novel failed to sell, and Vick continued to invade my thoughts on a regular basis, I finally decided she needed to be the person she was truly meant to be. By that point, I had already written and sold one novel featuring a bisexual protagonist (Vicious Circle in 2015), and I had gotten a lot more comfortable with myself, so I wrote Threadbare.

I did not start out to make Vick’s search for her own humanity and sense of self a metaphor for those being “othered” (to use your term) in today’s world, but I realized after writing the first few chapters that this was where my subconscious mind had taken me. Once I figured that out, then I worked to expand and extend that metaphor wherever I saw an opportunity to do so in the book. It became intentional very quickly; I did hope that readers who felt “othered” themselves would connect to her struggles.

Q: Now that I’ve read books one (Threadbare) and two (Patchwork—just released in April), I’m suffering some withdrawal having to wait for the conclusion. And I can’t tell anyone too many specifics, because spoilers would ruin the great twists and turns. Where can I find people to geek out about the books with? I have so many moments to relive, and that incredible cliffhanger to speculate about….

A: Well, my Elle E. Ire Facebook page might be a good place to find others who have finished at least Threadbare. And I’m always happy to talk to readers about my books on Facebook and Twitter. I especially love hearing which scenes really worked for readers and why, or whether they are primarily Team Vick or Team Kelly. And yeah, that cliffhanger at the end of Patchwork is a doozy. I thought one of my editors was going to strangle me for that one.

MB Austin is the creator of the Maji Rios series (Badass women in love and danger. Because saving the world is sexy.) Find out more at www.mbaustin.me.

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