Late Night Date Night - Afterward (Patreon)

As promised, this final “Late Night Date Night” post is about the origins and background behind the story. This is the first time I’ve ever tried to write about my process like this, and I’m not sure there’s much demand. But if any readers out there enjoy this sort of thing, let me know!

My essay skills are quite rusty, so pardon any clunkiness. Here we go…

“Late Night Date Night” was started in June 2022, and I worked on it until the first draft was completed one month later. After one round of revisions, I decided to shelve it in order to pursue other projects. In November 2023, I began a fresh round of edits for the Patreon. Those edits are now complete. At the time of this writing (late January 2024) the best version of the story is online.

The original motivation for LNDN came out of my desire to do a superhero story. It was going to be a romance from the beginning, but that aspect didn’t cause any problems—superheroes and kissing have always been highly compatible! No…I would find that my troubles lay in translating those heroes to the page in the first place.

Before I started “Late Night Date Night,” it always seemed strange to me how few superhero novels there were. You can find them, but it’s not a thriving genre—most are tie-ins (like Spider-Man or Superman books) or deconstructions (aka “the villains are actually the GOOD guys” books). At first I was just looking for some fun superhero novels to read, but I quickly found my options exhausted.

I didn’t get it.

If you look at other media, superheroes are everywhere. They've exploded out of comics to inhabit (infest?) movies, live-action TV, and animation. The pickings are only slim if you want to read original superhero tales. George R. R. Martin’s aging Wildcards anthology is often mentioned, but I never took the plunge; the reviews suggest it's a bit uneven and dark—which is a recurring theme (I’ll talk about that later on). If you want superhero stories that aren’t grim or bleak, your meager selection drops almost to nothing.

It didn’t take long for my frustration as a reader to morph into feeling like I was being challenged as a writer. Like a (Dr. Doom) gauntlet had been thrown at my feet. I mean, there were so few of these stories, but the media landscape was thirsty for the subject matter. A superhero prose story would be a great way to stand out!

Challenge (naively) accepted.

I didn’t go in completely blind. In fact, I gave my approach a lot of thought before I started typing. I asked myself what I liked so much about superheroes—beyond the obvious spandex-clad melodrama and amazing powers. What else sets superhero tales apart?

For me, the answer was their shared story space.

Spider-Man is great. I have fun reading about his adventures and watching him take down bad guys (at least when he and MJ are together). But when Spider-Man has to visit the Fantastic Four for help, or when Daredevil shows up because he and Spidey have been independently tracking down the Kingpin, those are moments I LOVE. Larger-than-life characters sharing a world that feels alive.

That became my first goal. I didn't want to just write a story about one superhero, I wanted to write a story about superheroes in a world of superheroes. Fortunately, I had a cheat sheet.

Back when I was pursuing filmmaking, one of my first feature scripts was a superhero film. It was called Extraordinary Individuals. It took place over three days, and focused on a small group of street-level heroes helping the “big league” supers search for a series of hidden bombs spread throughout their city. I’d worked hard to create a believable world in that script, to infuse the story with verisimilitude. Happily, I was able to draw on all that effort to build the foundation of the Lady Dark setting.

I should mention one other critical influence: the original Aberrant TTRPG. That game’s rules are a mess, but the background section is some of the finest setting design I’ve encountered. It seized my imagination when I first read it over a decade ago, and it’s remained my gold standard for speculative fiction worldbuilding ever since.

Okay, so I had a sense of a shared story space…but it was still all in my head. How could I get it on the page? I eventually hit upon the idea of using epistolary interludes (this was one of the things Aberrant excelled at). Not only would they flesh out the backstory of our dangerous vigilante—dubbed “Lady Dark” by the crime syndicate she was dismantling—but they would also show Lady Dark “doing her thing” among a multitude of other heroes.

The interludes provided fun framing around the more intimate story of Hollis and Jerome. They gave us hints of other supers (or “exceptionals” as they’re officially known in the world), like Alley Cat, Glidr Grrl, and of course our ultra powerful paragon, Strongest. More than that, they showed regular people dealing with their existence: analyzing them, reporting on them, and yes, writing fics about them. Going through my notes, I found a quick snippet I’d written about Glidr Grrl:

Glidr Grrl - Plucky teen super based out of Detroit that uses roller blades. One of the youngest sanctioned supers. Mostly does publicity and public service work.

That’s all I know about her. I’d forgotten I’d written it!

The interludes were a partial solution, but I wanted more, a proper super hero melting pot. What’s a comic book world without multiple series and guest appearances? That led to my last major decision. I decided this book would be an anthology. The final version would have three different storylines told in parallel, all supported and deepened by the interludes throughout. “Late Night Date Night” was planned as Part One.

The other stories were only sketchy notions in my head. I never settled on the third, but the second was going to be about Strongest—who’s a bit of a spaz outside the costume—trying to confess his feelings to star reporter Lynn Rainey (or maybe it would have been the other way around). The Superman and Lois Lane comparison was very intentional, but I swear I would have found a new way to explore it. At least…I would have tried.

If you’ve been wondering why LNDN is so low-key, you now have an answer. Its purpose was to ground the novel in rock-solid realism before I opened the floodgates on superheroic insanity. In Part One we play it cool. Hollis is clearly a girl with a secret, but I wanted to keep the hints of her life as Lady Dark a tantalizing mystery, one that we would solve alongside Jerome.

And that’s the story of how “Late Night Date Night” came to be…but it’s not quite the end of the story. I haven’t explained what happened to the rest of it. Or more accurately, why there isn’t a “rest of it.”

Well, to be blunt: superheroes are super fucking difficult to write.

Part One was my test balloon. A way for me to get a feel for the challenges I would face writing an ambitious superhero romance anthology. I wrote it, I finished it, I revised it…and then I stepped back to assess how I felt.

Really tired.

The month I’d spent on LNDN helped me to understand why so few original superhero novels exist. Creating a unique universe and then trying to populate it with the sorts of things that happen in comics while keeping the characters believable is TOUGH.

I think some authors change their tactics after hitting that wall. They stop trying to square “whiz-bang” action with authentic prose, and instead just alter the underlying genre. This may be the reason so many superhero novels turn into grim deconstructions. Without those vibrant comic panels it’s tough to maintain the feeling of fun. You end up with books that are either complete farce, or grimdark “real world supers would be monsters” stories.

It’s not impossible to do a straightforward superhero story—far from it—but doing it in prose adds a lot of challenge. One that I ultimately decided not to pursue. At the time, I hadn’t even completed a novella! A story of this scope was more daunting than I felt I could take on. I wouldn’t just be inviting failure, I’d be paying for failure’s plane ticket and asking it to sleep on my couch.

I set LNDN aside and got to work on an easier project. I went on to complete my first romance novella (which you might be seeing soon) and then my first novel (still unpublished) followed by my second (His Orc Charioteer Bride). My next novella is somewhere around the half-way mark, and my third novel will be finished after that. It was the right call.

But I never forgot this unique experiment about one unusual night of flirting, pancakes, and graffiti (sorry, I meant “street art”). And if you made it to the end, thank you for staying up late with Hollis, Jerome, and me!

Oops, almost forgot: I promised I would talk about what happened the next time Jerome and Hollis met. Well…remember how I said the following installments opened the floodgates? Poor Jerome was about to be inducted into a terrifying new world.

Hollis ghosts him for two weeks. Then, right before closing on a solo shift, he comes back from loading the dishwasher to find her sitting in her usual corner booth.

A wave of conflicting emotions crashes over him, but before he can sort them out he realizes something's wrong. Her skin is paler than her white-blond hair, and her lips have a bluish cast. He scrambles around the counter to check on her—and slips in the trail of blood leading to the booth.

Jerome discovers that Hollis is soaked in it, all from a single vicious wound. We later learn that the Milli had baited a trap and ambushed her with brutal thoroughness. She’d barely managed to escape, but the damage was done. She was dying.

Weakened and half-delirious, Hollis stumbled into the coffee shop to see Jerome. She didn’t have a plan, she just wanted to see him before it was too late. To her, their night together had been the first time she’d been happy since starting her fight against the syndicate.

But she underestimates the man who is just as obsessed with her. Using every ounce of empathy and heart he has, Jerome convinces her to hang on until help can arrive. He holds her hand, their palms slippery with blood, tethering her to every agonizing second. And when the EMTs arrive, Hollis is still breathing.

At the hospital, when they’re about to be separated, he blurts out that he’s her boyfriend. They let him through. And when Hollis wakes up thirty hours later, he’s still holding her hand.

Let the high-stakes superpowered romance commence!

I never plotted much further than that, but I had an idea of where the story was going. And as for Hollis’s origin? How her powers manifested and why she was tangling with the Milli? I’ll keep that secret a little longer. Maybe I'll share it in prose some day.

Wouldn’t that be super?