Hey, it's that guy!

It’s usually pretty easy to tell when a character is the author’s favorite, especially in a long-running series. This is particularly obvious in romance series, which tend to switch to a new couple every book…but there’s that guy (it’s always a guy), showing up for absolutely no reason, in a scene that revolves around him but rarely furthers the plot. It’s usually pretty tiresome.

And then there’s Ilya Rozanov.

I just finished reading Role Model by Rachel Reid. It’s the fifth book in her Game Changers series of M/M hockey romances. Ilya and his love interest Shane Hollander star in book 2, Heated Rivalry, and book 6, The Long Game (which I haven’t read yet, so no spoilers!). Ilya, an enormous, cocky Russian, could not more obviously be Reid’s favorite. He shows up in every single book to be enormous and Russian, steal a scene by issuing tactless but wise romantic advise, and vanish into the night. Role Model opens with a gratuitous scene of Ilya—who, I cannot stress enough, is not the protagonist of this book—playing with a puppy.

The vast majority of the time that this happens, it’s incredibly annoying. But I forgive Reid every time she does it, because Ilya’s my favorite too. Every time he shows up, I’m delighted. Everyone I know who has read these books is equally delighted by him. Look, it’s Ilya! Oh good, he’s still enormous and Russian! He has no plot reason to be here whatsoever!

I was talking to my writing group recently, and though we could name plenty of annoyingly obvious author favorites, we could only think of one other example of “guy who shows up in every book for no reason and we’re always thrilled by it”: Jules Cassidy, from Suzanne Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series. Jules, an out gay FBI agent back when gay characters were vanishingly rare in romance novels (2001, to be specific), first showed up in book 2 in a minor role; he continued to appear in larger and larger roles until book 8, Hot Target, where he meets his love interest Robin Chadwick, a closeted alcoholic movie star. Jules and Robin proceeded to ruthlessly steal book 11 from the ostensible leads, and eventually got married in their own novella, All Through the Night.

But even with his HEA (Happily Ever After) in the can, Jules continued to appear randomly throughout the rest of the series. At its most absurd, in a late-series book, two burly, extremely competent Navy SEALs call Jules for help, then hang up the phone and have a conversation about how wonderful Jules is. And I can’t even disagree, because I think so too.*

Which leaves me wondering what the secret sauce is. Why are Ilya and Jules so delightful when they’re shoehorned unnecessarily into a book, when other characters are so annoying? It’s not being enormous, because Jules is very small. He’s also not Russian, as far as I know.

This is kind of a silly topic, but it’s also a real writing question: How do you create a character readers never get tired of? And how much is too much?

I don’t have an answer, but maybe the TV adaptation of Heated Rivalry airing this month will shed some light. Let’s call it research.

*I originally wrote the above about a week before this newsletter went out, but I have a late-breaking update: Suzanne Brockmann just announced a new Troubleshooters book, five years after the last one, called Jules Cassidy, P.I., that apparently clocks in at a whopping 145k words—twice the length of a standard romance novel. So it turns out it can get more absurd. But you better believe I will be reading every single one of those words and probably enjoying them heartily.

What’s New?

Over at Book Riot, I wrote about the collapse of Diamond Comics and what it means for the comic book industry. It’s bad, basically! (But also kind of good?)

What I’m Reading

Books: Well, Role Model, obviously. And in a completely different vein, Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything by Alyson Stoner. Stoner is a former child actor best known as “the little white girl in the Missy Elliott videos” and from the Camp Rock movies, and their time in the child star trenches was…rough. As an adult, they’ve become an activist for improving the working conditions of child performers and bringing attention to all the myriad ways working in Hollywood (or, increasingly, on social media) can harm children. Stoner is extremely smart and has clearly done a lot of reflection on both themself and the industry, and this is a really interesting, compelling read. (All the trigger warnings, though. Like, for real, all of them.)

Comics: So…I’ve started reading the Krakoa era of X-Men comics, which…I don’t even know how to explain, let alone recommend, in a short newsletter. Basically, from 2019 to 2024, all the mutants lived on an island utopia, even the bad guys, and it was really weird and euphoric and culty and queer and I love it? The story itself consists of about 6-12 interconnected series at any given moment but I’m genuinely extremely impressed by how well it hangs together both as an overall narrative and as separate stories. I expect to have a lot of further thoughts on the narrative structure when I’ve read more of it, but that’s going to take…a while. If you want to join me on this quixotic journey, here’s the reading guide I’m following.

If you’re doing Nanowrimo (in spirit, at least, now that the official site has crashed and burned), I hope the words come easy. I’ve got a revision to finish this month, if I can tear myself away from the X-Men. Wish me luck!

<3

Jessica