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The rest of the alterations or additions were relatively minor, but changed the tone of the Butch/V interactions entirely—proving that a little goes a long way. Take, for example, the opening pages of chapter thirteen (p. 135). Butch and V are in bed together, and V is healing Butch after the cop did his business with a lesser. If you read through the second, third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs of my first draft, you’ll note that V is admitting to himself he needs soothing in the form of another warm body next to his. It’s not Butch’s body specifically, however, and there is no mention of anything sexual. It’s purely a comfort thing:

. . . With the visit from his mother and the shooting, he craved the closeness of another, needed to feel arms that returned his embrace. He had to have the beat of a heart against his own.

He spent so much time keeping his hand away from others, keeping himself apart from others. To let down his guard with the one person he truly trusted made his eyes sting.

—LOVER UNBOUND, p. 135

What I added in the second draft were these two paragraphs:

As Butch stretched out on Vishous’s bed, V was ashamed to admit it, but he’d spent a lot of days wondering what this would be like. Feel like. Smell like. Now that it was reality, he was glad he had to concentrate on healing Butch. Otherwise he had a feeling it would be too intense and he’d have to pull away. [p. 135]

Butch shifted, his legs brushing against V’s through the blankets. With a stab of guilt, V recalled the times he’d imagined himself with Butch, imagined the two of them lying as they were now, imagined them . . . well, healing wasn’t the half of it. [p. 136]

Much more honest about what was really going on. Much better. Could have gone even farther, but it was enough—so much so that it required me to add the few sentences that followed, to clarify for the reader that Jane was the object of V’s desire now.

That’s the thing with writing. Books to me are like ships on oceanic courses. Small, incremental changes can have huge effects in their ultimate trajectory and destination. And the only way to get it right is to constantly reread and double-check and make sure that what’s on the page takes the reader where they have to go. Once I made those changes (there were a number of other places where I did a little tinkering—including, for example, the dagger scene in the beginning of the book where Butch lifts V’s chin up with the weapon Vishous just made for him), the writing in V’s POV got much easier.

Bottom line? I look at the whole mess as yet another example of rule number eight at work: Once I was more true to what was in my head, the writing block was lifted.

As for the scene from the war camp where V loses his virginity by taking another male? Man, I just wasn’t sure how people would view him after that one. The thing was, he wasn’t given a choice, and it was the standard of the camp: In hand-to-hand combat practice, losers were sexually dominated by winners. The key, I decided, was to show as much context as possible—and to depict V’s internal commitment after it was over that he would never do it again.

After my editor read the new material, I was relieved when she said that it worked for her, but I remained concerned what the overall reader reaction was going to be. For me as an author, reader response is something that weighs on me, but in a curious way. It’s in my mind because unless people buy the books I write, I’m out of a job. But the thing is, I can’t write to please readers, because I truly don’t have much control over my stories. The best I can do, as I’ve said, is always be mindful and respectful and thoughtful with the challenging content. I suppose I kind of live by the motto, It’s not what you do, but how you do it.

Funny, though. Little did I know that the negative reaction about V’s book would concern something else entirely.

Which brings us to Jane.

The third reason the book was so agonizing