A reader emailed me last month with one line. You knew I loved her and you did it anyway.

She was right. I did know. And I want to tell you why, because the answer is the whole reason I write the way I do, and it might tell you whether my books are for you.

The tiger

Every character I write starts with an object, not a backstory.

Mason Caldwell, the cowboy at the center of the Windward Cup Dynasty, has a small plastic tiger. His mother bought it for him at a zoo when he was a boy, on the one good day he can remember having with her. He was fifteen when she put him out of the house. He still has the tiger. He has never told anyone about it, and by the third book the man he loves still doesn’t know it exists.

That tiger tells me more about Mason than a page of history would. It tells me he keeps things. It tells me he was loved once and can’t trust that it was real. And it tells me exactly what he will and won’t be able to say to Julian when it matters, which is what the romance is actually about.

If you want to meet Mason at fifteen, hungry, caught stealing from a grocery store by a rancher who feeds him first and makes him a deal second, that’s Stick & Ball. It’s free. It’s the story of how a kid with nothing became the best horseman in Texas, and it’s where the tiger comes from.

The thing they won’t ask for

From the object I work outward to one question. What does this man want that he will not ask for out loud.

That question is the engine of every love story I’ve written. Mason won’t ask anyone to stay, because the last person he asked left anyway. Cal, in the Hollow Clock Saga, won’t ask to be forgiven for what he did with his gift, so he keeps a written record of the dead instead. Augie, in the Bear Hunt Stories, won’t ask for help with his sister’s boy because asking would mean admitting he can’t do it alone.

Two men who each want something they can’t say. A whole book of them getting close enough to say it. That’s the shape of it, every time, in every genre I write. Polo. Gaslamp fantasy. A small town in the Cascades. The setting changes. The men don’t ask. Then they do.

The deal about who survives

Which brings me to the email.

I write romance, and romance is a contract. The two men on the cover end the book together. It’s on the front page of this website. It is never, ever broken. If you pick up one of my books and fall for the couple on the cover, they are safe. I promise you that.

Everyone else is negotiable.

I think that’s what makes the promise mean something. A book where nothing can be lost has a last page. A book where something can be lost has an ending. I want you to close my books feeling that the two of them earned it, and you can’t earn what was never at risk.

How I choose

I don’t kill a character to shock you. Shock lasts a chapter. I do it when the loss will change the men left behind in a way nothing else could, and when I’m prepared to sit inside that change with them instead of skipping to whatever plot it unlocks.

In Sudden Death, out October 6, somebody dies in the opening chapters. I won’t tell you who. What I will tell you is that the chapter I rewrote more than any other in that book wasn’t the death. It was the funeral, and the question of who was allowed to sit in the front row, and who had loved him longest and had no standing to be there at all. Grief in my books is mostly about standing. Who is permitted to be seen to mourn.

In the Hollow Clock Saga there’s a scene where two people have the power to bring someone back, and she asks them not to. I wrote it four times. Each time I tried to find a way to let them save her, and each time the book got smaller. In the end I let them do what she asked. It’s the scene I’m proudest of, and it is the one that gets me the angriest mail.

In Stick & Ball an old ranch hand teaches Mason everything without once being kind about it, and then dies between one part of the story and the next, off the page. Readers ask why he doesn’t get a scene. Because he’d have hated one. Because Mason knows that. And because the space where the scene should be is the point.

They don’t leave

The last thing I’ve learned is that the dead stay in the book. A man who dies in chapter three is in every chapter after it, because the men who loved him are. Somebody keeps something. Somebody can’t throw it away. The tiger rule works for the living and the dead alike.

So here is my answer to the reader who emailed. Yes, I knew. I did it because of what it made of the men who survived them, and because the two on the cover were still standing at the end. That’s the deal. It’s the only one I make.

Where to start

If you’ve never read me, start free. Stick & Ball is the cowboy. The Hollow Asylum is the gaslamp. The Timber Wolf is the gay bear. In the Serpent's Shadow is the thriller. Each one is the doorway into a series, and each one will tell you in an hour whether you and I are going to get along.

If you’re already here for Julian and Mason, Sudden Death is on preorder now, and this is the book the tiger was for.

And if there’s a death in one of my books that still bothers you, reply to this and tell me which. I read every one. Sometimes I even write back and apologize. I don’t take it back, though.

Yours, Elias