by Sean Platt
“It was good.”
“Good?”
“Yes, good.”
“Would your neighbors complain?”
Lily recalled the open window. Feeling like a naughty schoolgirl, she said, “Probably.”
Allison’s smile opened wide. She slapped Lily roundly on both arms, chasing her around the store while making terrible Australian-themed sexual puns.
“You could totally fuck Cameron.”
“Look,” said Lily. “I do like your brother. I think he’s cute, and he seems very sweet. But if you want me to even consider dating him, you need to stop telling me how much he wants to have sex with me.”
“But he does.”
“Does he talk about it all the time the way you do, in those terms?”
Allison looked like she was about to lay on a whopper. Then she said, “Okay, no. He said the sink thing. But usually he just tells me you’re pretty.”
“Just pretty?”
“Stop digging for compliments. You’re hot. You’re the whole package. If I were gay or bi, I’d fuck you. But I’m not.” She narrowed her eyes. “So don’t try to fuck me, Lily.”
She looked over. “Fine. I’ll try to hold myself back.”
“So should I tell him to ask you out?”
Lily rolled her eyes.
“Oh, just let me tell him,” Allison said.
“Well, that’s a compelling argument.” Then, giving in to something she’d been considering since the day Cameron had announced Allison’s bad news, she sighed and said, “Fine.”
“Fine I can tell him?”
“Fine. You can tell him,” Lily confirmed.
“Good. Because I sort of already set you up. You’re going out tomorrow.”
“Allison!” Lily put her hands on her hips. “How did you even do that?”
“It’s not like Cameron takes a lot of convincing where you’re concerned. He’ll pick you up here at eight. Dress less slutty than I’ve implied. You’re right; he actually is sweet most of the time.”
Lily shook her head, exhaling loudly to express her disapproval. But after a few minutes she felt a sense of abiding calm descend, and any negative feelings were buried as if beneath a blanket of snow. For the first time since Lily’s arrival in California, she had a modicum of peace. Were all of her problems solved? Not at all. But she was on her way, and the future was finally looking somewhat bright.
Just as she was preparing to reengage Allison in conversation — tacitly forgiving her for the presumptuous, unauthorized matchmaking — Lily heard footsteps behind her. She turned to see Matthew Vitale, holding a single red rose.
“This is from my father,” he said, extending the flower. “In thanks.”
Lily took the rose, surprisingly moved by the gesture’s old-fashioned courtesy. It seemed exactly like something an honorable Italian would do. She smelled the bloom, seeing its brilliant red as a fiery contrast to her all-white stock.
“Thank you,” she said.
“And, I’ve been asked to invite you to Bella.”
Lily looked at Allison, then at Matt.
“Are you changing your order? Or you need help with your arrangements?”
Matt shook his head, those piercing blue eyes seeming to stare right through her.
“You misunderstand,” he said. “I’m inviting you to dinner.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It’s hilarious, the stuff Johnny and I sometimes try to do.
Just look at the Realm & Sands catalogue, and you can get an idea of the crazy storytelling shenanigans we can’t help getting into. We started our writing adventures with Unicorn Western. Then, once finished with our crazy-amazing fantasy epic, we went right into The Beam. That pair of sprawling narratives couldn’t be more different, except for the inquisitive fiction that’s beating in both of their hearts. Those two books were followed by sci-fi, laugh-out-loud comedies, a revenge thriller, and some straight-up, bone-dry horror.
It was only a matter of time before we got to writing romance.
Back in our first year writing together, before we’d really even formed our publishing company Sterling & Stone, we were working with a writer named Lexi Maxxwell (obviously a pen name). She was penning these dirty little stories with titles like Call of Booty, The XXX Files, and Swallowing Secrets. Lexi was doing well, both bonding with her audience and selling a surprising number of books — mostly short stories that got right to the point and left little (okay, nothing) to the imagination.
Lexi is smart and ambitious, plus a solid writer with a fantastic sense of humor, so were thrilled when she joined forces with Sterling & Stone.
Problem is, Lexi is also sort of flaky (she’d have no problem with our saying that — the girl wears truth like a badge). And unfortunately, she temporarily fell off the face of the Earth, right after joining the Family. Being the optimists that we are, Johnny and I saw this as a terrific opportunity to start writing romances, which we’d both been wanting to do for a while. It would be EASY, we told ourselves — all we had to do is get our words on the page and borrow Lexi’s pen name. Lexi herself didn’t write romance (her stories were decidedly “erotica,” and didn’t even pretend at romantic plots most of the time), but that was the least of the ridiculous oversights we had in the illogical chain of events I’m describing.
The bigger oversight was that we didn’t know how to write romance at all.
Back then, we didn’t understand the genre, nor did we read it ourselves. Flash forward a few years, and I can’t count the number of romances I’ve read, and we’ve both devoted endless hours to understanding this genre we now love.
But back then … not so much.
Worse, we were betraying Lexi’s brand without even realizing it. We were trying to “elevate” her stories, giving more layers to character and setting and overall narrative.
But that isn’t what her readers wanted. At all.
They wanted quick and dirty stories with copious amounts of sex. We wanted to write a story that had some sex, but was more focused on character than anything else.
Fortunately, our naivety served us. Writing a few stories as Lexi (and failing) taught us a ton about the market, and the (obvious) differences between erotica, erotic romance, and romance.
Oh, and by the way in case it isn’t obvious? La Fleur de Blanc wasn’t close to any of those genres.
La Fleur is a romantic book … but it’s nowhere close to a romance. It doesn’t even have a “happily ever after” ending — an unforgivable sin when writing a romance.
But that’s okay because this book still gave us one of the best writing experiences we’ve ever had at Realm & Sands.
A lot of thought and pre-planning went into La Fleur. Before starting, Johnny was in Austin for an event we were having (he didn’t live here yet), and we discussed this book a ton, even visiting a few hoity-toity flower shops and furniture stores in the name of accurate research.
And there is a tremendous amount of me in this book as well. Of course, there’s always a lot of us in all of our stories. That’s not only one of the primary reasons we write fiction; it’s the number one element shaping our work. That’s what Realm & Sands is all about: writing what we call “inquisitive fiction” helps Johnny and me to understand the world a bit better for ourselves. But this book was more personal than most.
I grew up in a family flower shop, in a shopping center that wasn’t all that different from the Palms Couture. And that history laid a large part of this story’s foundation.
But more than that, this book helped me to fulfill a couple of my early adult dreams by allowing me to do things I never would have otherwise been able to do. And that’s part of the joy of writing: getting to do things you could never do in real life. Let’s say you want to visit Paris or pull off a heist or murder the terrible girl who put gum in your hair while you were minding your own business on the bus when you were thirteen years old — as an author you can do all of those things.
I’ve always loved bu
siness, yet can only build so many businesses in real life. Of course, that simple limitation has never kept my busy mind from thinking up new ones. And back when I was around twenty years old I had two ideas for businesses that I knew I could never build, no matter how cool they were or how much I wanted to.
The first of the two would be called La Fleur de Blanc: a flower shop that only sold flowers in shades of white. At the time I was in love with the concept, and my family’s shop (called Rainbows, in Long Beach, California), always had a large all-white display. But as big as it was, that pageantry rarely claimed more than a corner of the store. A shop that only sold white flowers was impractical, but it’s that exact lack of practicality that gave it a fairy-tale feeling that never quite left my head.
Same for Bella by the Sea.
That second fantasy business from my early days didn’t have a name until it was born in this story, but the idea is virtually unchanged from its inception during a conversation with my father twenty years ago: a restaurant so exclusive it would only have one or two couples a night, and charge accordingly.
This story’s elements came together beautifully. We loved this book from the first page, and both of us always felt it unfolded like a film. It was hard to not release it with our own names that first time we decided to call it a Lexi book … and, as things turned out, to release it to an audience that didn’t even want it.
Where’s all the sex? they asked Lexi, thinking of her usual stories.
Why the hell are there so many arguments?
This isn’t the sort of story I signed up for at all!
But it’s exactly the story that Johnny and I signed up for, even though it took a few years for us to realize we should have released it under our own names to begin with. Mostly, like Lexi, we also write books very different from La Fleur (Axis of Aaron and Devil May Care are probably the closest to this book, and they’re still very different), but this is a story that we wanted to tell anyway. So we told it … as our own, rather than Lexi Maxxwell’s this time.
And now that we’ve decided to release it as a Platt & Truant project, La Fleur de Blanc is finally where it always belonged.
Honestly, we’d love to write more books like it.
We love this world and these characters. If the book does well — both with reasonable sales and positive reviews — it’s a world we’d love to revisit. We’re dying to see what will happen to Lily and Matt Vitale … not to mention Kerry Barrett Kirby.
But for now, we’re content to take this existing tale in another direction. La Fleur has always felt like a movie, and when we decided that Sterling & Stone would start adapting some of our preexisting work into screenplays, this story felt ripe for transition.
So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
As soon as I finish this Author’s Note, I’m going to start writing the script for La Fleur. And hopefully, if all goes well, one day you’ll be seeing Lily duking it out with Kerry Barrett Kirby on the big screen.
As always, thanks so much for reading. We couldn’t do this without you!
Sean (and Johnny)
July 16, 2016
Learn the Story Behind La Fleur de Blanc
Want to know how this book was written? Back Story is our podcast where we talk about the creation and writing of all our books. Follow the link below to hear how we took La Fleur from concept to completed work. It’s like DVD extras, but for books.
Go here to get the Back Story:
http://sterlingandstone.net/go/la-fleur-backstory/
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sean Platt is the bestselling co-author of over 60 books, including breakout post-apocalyptic horror serial Yesterday’s Gone, literary mind-bender Axis of Aaron, and the blockbuster sci-fi series, Invasion. Never one for staying inside a single box for long, he also writes smart stories for children under the pen name Guy Incognito, and laugh out loud comedies which are absolutely not for children.
He is also the founder of the Sterling & Stone Story Studio and along with partners Johnny B. Truant and David W. Wright hosts the weekly Self-Publishing Podcast, openly sharing his journey as an author-entrepreneur and publisher.
Sean is often spotted taking long walks, eating brisket with his fingers, or watching movies with his family in Austin, Texas. You can find him at www.SterlingAndStone.net.
Johnny B. Truant is the bestselling author of the Invasion series, the political sci-fi thriller The Beam, Fat Vampire, Axis of Aaron, Unicorn Western, and many more fiction titles in addition to the nonfiction bestseller Write. Publish. Repeat.
He is also co-owner of the Sterling & Stone Story Studio, and along with partners Sean Platt and David W. Wright hosts the weekly Self-Publishing Podcast, openly sharing his journey as an author-entrepreneur and publisher.
Johnny and his family are thrilled to finally call Austin, Texas their home after far too many years of planning to move and complaining about life in northern Ohio. You can usually find him hanging out at www.SterlingAndStone.net.
