The Heart of the Matter

What is 'The New Place' about? Oh, many, many things, but let's start with the most important: 

This book is a love letter to my dog, Russell, who had Cushings and lived for 16 happy years until it was time for him to go play in the big farm in the sky. I miss him, but I'm also so happy for him that the disease was something we were in a position to treat and it didn't slow him down at all. Russ, I miss you hunting butterflies and your eyebrows and your fluffy toe hair and your handsome neck ruff. You were my first dog as an adult, and I’m so thankful I got to be your person.

This book is also a love letter to... well, love. Corny as hell, right? But also very true. This story centers around how much hard work a relationship really is. As I said in another blog post, I let Claire in Chapter 17 bring us the dialogue that ties together my whole thesis of 'The New Place': “And it’s one thing to have fun and another entirely to build something together.” As romance readers, we typically get to see the fun part of a couple falling in love, and we rarely see what comes after. I knew I wanted to write more about Ned and Abbot, and they gave me the perfect opportunity to stretch myself in trying to write not a 'falling in love' story, but a 'being in love' one, which was so much the same and so very, very different.

Romance books grapple with the question: will these two end up together? And like good genre fiction, these stories answer their own question with a resounding yes, as the two love interests overcome internal and external issues to get their happy ending. But a sequel to a romance novel asks: what does it take for these two people to stay together? And what happens when the going gets hard, and real life issues start to spring up, and there's not the bliss of new attraction, but instead growing small irritations and complexities of miscommunication and our own inherent, inevitable, personal weaknesses?

Well, some couples make it and some couples don't, and obviously, Ned and Abbot are in that first category. But how far could I push them? And how exactly did I want to set up their story to take a good hard look at how much they'd each have to grow in order to keep their relationship healthy? In the end, I decided that what I was really excited to write about was taking them from a place of the 'later' in Ned's mind that encompasses everything in their future, to the 'ok, but when?' that Abbot keeps asking. Claire and her ex were important examples to draw on here, because her ex had their relationship stuck in a perpetual 'someday' that she finally called him on, and he couldn't (wouldn't!) make the transition to 'now' or even 'soon.' I knew that when the pressure peaked for Ned, he would get on board with an actual timeline, though he was going to go through some struggles to achieve that (and it would take some fits and starts to work that timeline down from a vague 'five years' to 'let's put real dates on the calendar for the upcoming immediate future').

So with this in mind, early on in writing 'The New Place', I decided that I wanted this book to be a commentary on the Romance genre as a whole: being compatible is different than showing up, and good sex and fun times isn’t the same as a good relationship. The ingredients in a romance book that has two people falling for each other aren't the same ingredients that have two people going the distance, because when you get to the end of the book, that's where the relationship actually starts.

After Claire delivers that line to Abbot in Chapter 17, I intentionally started the next chapter with Abbot's attraction to Ned:

"Abbot can’t help but let his eyes track over Ned. The sheer physicality of him catches Abbot’s interest all over again, the width of his shoulders and how he carries himself when he walks with such easy confidence. He smells good too, stepping close, his fingers running along Abbot’s arm and sending a tickle down his spine. The attraction Abbot felt when Ned first walked into his classroom all those years ago hasn’t faded."

In doing so, I wanted to make the point that the flirty banter of two people initially coming together isn't nearly as important as the work they need to do to show up for the other, to face their own internal fears, and to bring a better version of themselves to the relationship, while also asking for what they need from their partner. In this scene, we even have Abbot asking himself, in regards to how good he feels around Ned: "Surely that’s more important than anything else, isn’t it?"

And my answer to that follows in the same chapter: no, it's not more important. Attraction and that blissed out feeling of easy, surface level comfort isn't enough to make a long-term relationship work. Ned and Abbot have a lot of work to do, which is named here in Chapter 18 as Abbot struggles to open up to Ned about Beverly, and Ned continues to resist any forward momentum towards cohabitation, even as Abbot presses for it. Abbot is still plenty attracted to Ned (and vice versa), but they've gotten as far as they can on the strength of that attraction, the patter of their banter together, and the fun of simply sharing their time. In a lot of ways, here in Chapter 18 we have a turning point as Ned and Abbot start to really grapple with the issues that have piled up through the first two thirds of the book. They're out of runway, and they need to decide if they're pressing forward or, as Ned reflects in Chapter 36, if they're going to remain/retreat back to the spot in their relationship where they started the book:

"Both of them could flee from this night of conversation and avoid the discussion entirely. Go back to an earlier version of their relationship when they didn’t have to deal with hard shit and happily stay there. Or not so happily, maybe. They’d be letting issues that seemed small fester and build until that simplicity became an oil slick over the turmoil beneath. This is better. Worse, too, but also the way forward."

Claire's ex never took this leap forward, and a lot of the argument I'm trying to make in 'The New Place' is that both Ned and Abbot are willing to do the necessary, hard work, as painful as it is for each of them.

And that's what got me excited to write this book. Not to take an easy victory lap for these two, but to really witness them moving forward as a couple and as people.

I've whetted my appetite for this type of writing, so let's see what other sequels I dream up. I know a lot of the romance genre creates series by taking side characters and making them the love interests in the next books, but I'm wondering how much more I can get out of the books I've already written, because as Ned and Abbot taught me, there's plenty to explore and I really love doing it.