Rusty photo © Wrangel
Background photo © David Coleman

I’ll admit it … when reviewing the stories I was planning for Diary of a Misfit I realized I needed a few lighter stories to balance out some of the heavier topics included in the collection and the first thing that popped into my head was an entry about Rusty. *Sigh* Rusty is the sort of character writers fall in love with. He waltzed into the story during Nowhere Feels Like Home, unexpected, larger-than-life, flawed, and irresistible. And not only irresistible to me, but to Sarah and Katie as well. And since these are excerpts out of Katie’s diary, I knew she wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about the most romantic thing she’d ever seen in her life (followed of course by lots of exclamation marks)

Before Rusty had revealed himself to me, I had been getting snippets of what looked like a near rape scene involving Sarah. I knew what I was getting was something out of Sarah’s past, when she was Katie’s age, and it bothered me on a couple levels. The first level was that I had never gotten the sense from Sarah that she had been through that type of experience, and I felt like I should have known before. And the second level was that while I may write a rape scene at some point in my writing career, I really didn’t want it to happen in this series. But as a writer, I follow the path I’ve been shown, so I tucked the scene away and forged ahead, happy not to be at that point in the story, because I knew it’d be a difficult scene to write.

Then Rusty showed up and I knew he was the guy in the scene, but I couldn’t believe it. While he definitely had a dangerous side to him, his feelings about Sarah were pure. Well, as pure as a teenage boy’s can be. As we got closer to where I knew that scene fit, I became more concerned because I really liked Rusty, and it would make the scene even more difficult to write. Until I finally had a clear vision of what actually happened. The way I had seen the scene before was through Matt and Mark’s eyes, and what they saw looked a lot worse than what had happened.

Teaser: A ghost from the past makes an appearance as a marine recruiter, and Sarah and Katie are swept away.

Diary of a Misfit is available now for Kindle. A portion of the proceeds from Diary of a Misfit will go to the Shaka Franklin Foundation for Youth.