James Crawford's Writing Blog

the beginning of the third book when the second hasn’t even been released yet? I don’t know! Want to try?

Let’s go!

She trains for it every single day. Before the day that went to hell, she was a blade fancier, just like me. Not anymore. Now she’s bare-hands, guns, and a club as long as my biological forearm. Her choice of weapons isn’t the beginning or the end of how she changed in the months after that night.

I watched her spar with four recruits one afternoon and it was one of the most brutal physical beat-downs I’ve ever seen. Charlie demolished them all. Thankfully, the guys were recent nanotechnology recipients—they healed well and quickly—or there would have been four battered corpses on the floor of the gymnasium.

Her physical appearance changed to match her feelings, I think. When we first met, she looked like ¼ tomboy, ¾ hot country chic. She was curvy, really curvy, and maybe a pinkie finger width overweight. It didn’t matter to me because she was spine-straightening gorgeous, but I knew she didn’t feel good about it.

When I’d last laid eyes on her, prior to our afternoon Slopehead encounter, there was not a single extra ounce of weight on her. Sure, the curves hadn’t disappeared, but the rest of her was ripped and lean.

She’d also cut her hair; the blonde curls I loved so much were gone, replaced by unevenly cropped spikes.

You get the idea.

My reverie was disrupted by the thunk of tires over the lid of “severe tire damage” spikes outside the far gates of NOVA FOB 001—I used to call it “home” before it became a base and sprouted acronyms like a herpes outbreak.

Northern Virginia Forward Operation Base 001.

If we’d been asked to brainstorm on a name, we would have come up with something much more creative. They didn’t ask.