Page 92 of Off Limits

“I’m not all that great at talking, either.” I chewed on my lip for a few beats. “I was going to ask you about your writing.”

“My writing?”

“Yeah. I was thinking about it the other day, and I realized that I have no idea what you write.”

He blinked a few times, obviously surprised by the shift in our conversation.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“It’s not that.” He shot me an apologetic look. “I just wasn’t expecting that. Zander and Dev are the only people who ever ask about my writing.”

“So what do you write?” I prompted.

“Lots of stuff.” He huffed out an embarrassed laugh. “Books, mostly. Some short stories and novellas, but mostly books.”

“How many books have you finished?”

“Seventeen.”

I almost choked on nothing. “You’ve written seventeen books? Like whole-ass books?”

He chuckled. “Yup, whole-ass books.”

“Like novel-sized books?” I couldn’t help asking.

The thought of writing one novel was daunting. I couldn’t imagine writing seventeen of them.

“Yup.” He grinned. “I average about a hundred and twenty thousand words per manuscript.”

“I have no idea how long that is, but it sounds massive.”

“It’s on the long end of novels. But that’s just because of what I’m writing. I used to average around eighty thousand words a few years ago. Different genres, different lengths.”

“Eighty thousand words still sounds huge.”

“It’s mid-range. That would be around three hundred pages if it was a paperback.”

“So what do you write about? Do you write connected books, or are they all individual ideas?”

“Both. I like writing series because it’s fun to build an entire world and interconnect things, but sometimes I get an idea that doesn’t fit with anything else.”

“What are you working on right now?”

He leaned back against the couch, his posture relaxed. “I’ve been working on a fantasy series.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “I’m about halfway done with book three.”

“What’s the series about?”

“You want to hear about it?” He looked surprised.

“Yeah.”

He smiled shyly. “It’s about a group of villains who are forced to become the good guys to save their world from the ‘good’ guys who are in power and have become the villains.”

“That’s an interesting concept. Like the reluctant hero trope.”

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