Building Worlds, Breaking Genres and the Limerent Series with Lexy Delorme | Episode 136

Lexie DeLorme, welcome to the Bookaholic Podcast. Hello. How are you? I'm doing great. And we are talking to you from Paris, France. Yay. One of my favorite cities in the world. I'm so jealous. I wish I was over there. Oh, wow. That is fantastic. Wow. Okay. Since we were talking about Paris, let me get into that little part right quick. So how is it to be an expat? What is that? And how does that inspire your writing? Really does. But I have to go a little bit back because the reason I'm an expat is because I always was. I grew up in a military family. And so we moved. I never lived anywhere growing up more than two years, but it was mainly within the U.S. And I also lived in Hawaii for four years growing up. That was an art assignment. So rough. So rough. Yeah. And then we went through, I was born in California, Texas, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Orleans, and then to North Carolina where I went to high school. Then when I'm located, exactly. I went to UNC for a life. Yep. It's the UNC girls were great. And then I got a job doing international startup work for a bank. Then I basically went out, did new country entry work for South Africa, for Spain, for France and for China, for Shanghai. And opened up new countries, did for the bank, did, did mergers, did DeNovo's, did wholly owned subsidiaries, a whole bunch of things. And then my parents were getting older. So I came back home. But as I came back home, I met a French man at my work. And I said, I'm tired of working with French people because I've been working with French people. And my boss was like, Oh no, he's great. And then three years later we were married because I was on the legal side of the house and he was on the business side of the house. So it was nature to argue and we figured we'd just do that on a regular basis. Right. Absolutely. California. My first son was born in Virginia and then we moved to California and then he got a job doing basically working for a bank as an international manager. And I decided I was not going to take the bar everywhere we moved. So I started writing and it started out for me doing travel writing. So I wrote for Bon Jovi, places doing travel writing went in Hong Kong. I wrote for play times. And when I came to, when I moved to London years, 2015 I decided I'm going to start doing fiction because I have, I've always wanted, I've always been written short stories. That's the one thing that's been the same in all of my jobs, which is I, I, I wrote, so my undergrad was in the sciences and then I went to, but all of its writing and legal writing, did science writing, did you know? And Oh yeah. And I was, when I was young, I was in a band and we had a video on TV in the middle of the night. I won't say what it is, but, and so I wrote and did music too. Not giving any bad. I love it. So I decided that I wanted to try actually doing a longer form and it took me literally probably six years to craft the world. So it's a series built in full world building. A lot went into it. Yes, I can see that because you do an amazing job of cross genre, which we're going to really dig into in just a few minutes. So let's go back again. You are a recovering attorney. I've had so many guests on this channel who are or have been recovering attorneys and they turn to writing. There must be something there. You got your John Grisham's and maybe even Scott Tarot, I think was a recovering attorney. But anyway, it just seems to be a natural crossover for a lot of people. In the legal department I was in, I worked with a lot of people who had been artists before and legal. And yeah, what happens is we all, I did music and stuff. So what happens, we're all doing this stuff and we're realizing I'm not going to get any money with this when we're first doing it. Okay. What do I have going for me? I'm smart. Okay. I took the LSAT and we all ended up in the legal profession and I don't know a whole lot of lawyers that are actually happy. So you do it for a while. I, as a legal job, I had a good one. But then when we get a chance to get away from it, when we've earned enough money, when we've had enough experience, we're like, okay, what can I do now to go back to that thing that I love so much and it's always infused my life with meaning. Absolutely. Absolutely. Your depth of life, your depth of living has given you a very rich experience to knowing about different cultures, even in the United States where it's state has a kind of different culture. They don't realize it. Exactly. So yes, because they see us as the whole United States and the one thing, but so you've had a very rich life now when you were younger, I'm sure when your family was moving around and you couldn't make concrete friends for very long before there was any social media, you probably didn't feel that way. But that's what it has evolutionized into. And that's where I see. And you correct me if I'm wrong. That's what I see. You have this ability and I really will say to you, I don't think I've interviewed anyone today on my channel who has done this cross genre and to this degree and can keep up with all of this. I don't think I've ever had anybody to do this. So this is something I really want to dive into because it's definitely genius. And one of the audiences I do talk to are also people who are aspiring writers because avid readers a lot of the times are aspiring writers. Okay. So you said that just a few minutes ago that it took you six years to create the world. And I've had some book coaches on this channel. One guy that really specialized in only fantasy world building because that's the main area where you'd have to build a wars in fantasy. But tell us about your process over the course of six years of building this world. So it started, it started a bit small. So it started with, I had characters in my head, right? I had people that I crafted in my head just from news stories or hearing something. Right. And a few of them I liked so much that I wanted to find a space for them. Wow. And I was always a reader as well. And I read cross genre. I read a bunch of different things. Big fan. What's it down was one of my favorite books. Very fantastic. I read horror. I read HP Lovecraft and Stephen King. I read, I read all the cheesy romance teenage romance novels. I read flowers in the attic. Oh, I did too. I read the whole thing. Yeah. And watched the Lifetime movies. You look at the, you look now at the Gen Z's and they're like coddled with the, Oh, we only want empathy books. We read this stuff. Absolutely. We were traumatized. Stephen King. Yeah. So I use all of those things. I used the, the things that I had loved in characters and I did it to the mind character. And then how I created the world is I had a mindset that one of the reasons I want to write is that I have seen a lot of beautiful and interesting things. I have experienced a lot of things that maybe people haven't experienced. And what I decided I wanted to do is capture those moments in books so I can share them and they don't die when I do. Right. So this is part of what the world building thing is for me crafting. And also they say, write to answer your own questions. And this series, which is a long series, it's eight books long. I've written all of them. Some are in various stages of edit. The first four are out. The fifth one will come out this fall and the others are done, but in various stages of edit, my question I'm answering for myself through the end is what is consciousness? The big questions. How does love question? Yeah. How does love play into this? And so that, and then to do this, I crafted different stories and this kind of gets into the books, but the first three books of the series are, can be read in any order. It can be read in any order. Okay. No order required. All of them are, but yet, but there's the same characters in the three. Oh, Oh, because they're in the same world. Yeah. So what happens, what happens is the, all these three books have paranormal and romance, but they also have a subgenre as well. So Cayo is a paranormal romance, but it is also a legal fiction. And it works with the themes of appearance versus reality. Okay. It has in it a woman, a woman meets someone who appears to be a late teenager and clearly is not. And with a legal mystery as well. The second book, which is called bright midnights is a paranormal romance, but also a coming of age novel, high school setting us, right? Yes. High school in North Carolina. Wow. Okay. Okay. And it's YA. It's YA. Yeah. And the third book you'll love is, was actually set in North Carolina. It is called family fireflies. It is a paranormal romance, but also historical fiction set in the 1940s and world war two. And it is partially a family story for me. I put his stuff with my family in it and it's the story of a poor white woman living in the South who works in a cigarette factory, who works the draft office on the weekends and ends up processing an African American soldier. Oh wow. All of the stuff that comes from that. Wow. So all of, yeah, yeah. That book's going on book tour in a few weeks, I think, but absolutely. And then all of those books, all those characters, all these stories come together in a fourth book called ghosting Academy. And that is a psychological thriller. VR technology, elite agents and spiritual unraveling. Oh man. Oh gosh. I just like taking a back. They all come together in ghosting Academy. Oh my goodness. Okay. Now let me ask you, so you're saying that some of these are paranormal. So sometimes I think I mentioned Stephen King just in passing minutes ago. So I used to read all of his books, but then I was like, I can no longer read this type of book anymore. So for those readers who can't see themselves reading paranormal, can you tell us a little bit about your paranormal activity in these books to, maybe it's not like horror, but what it, how is that infused? So in my books, the horror is only the horror people do to other people. Ah, and there is some of that in space, I will tell you, but all my books are urban fiction. So it's, there is there are paranormal elements in it and it's, there's no vampires, there's no werewolves, there's no witches passing spells, nothing like that. But you do have spirits and you have ghosts and you have different types of spirits in it, but it's not, it isn't heavy. It isn't hardcore. It isn't hardcore horror. It starts to get more horror and ghosting, Kathy, but I will tell you to check your trigger warnings because as I said, this is what people do to people. And there's a lot of that in this. There's a lot of people who have been abused, like in Kyle, Sarah going out. I actually based her on a number of my friends who have been in relationships and isn't an abusive relationship when the book starts and is so deeply entrenched in an abusive relationship. She doesn't even see it as abusive. She just sees it as she's not worth it. And so this book is about her coming out of that and seeing a world that exists that is not just beyond what she thought of herself, but beyond what she knew for the good and bad. Basically the scope of her world went from this to this with the spectrum. The bag is much worse, the potential for bad, but also the good gets much better. So the creation and destruction there. So this is in this book of Kyle, it's all really about appearance versus reality. So what is being presented as being good and right is actually not. And what is presented as this isn't good, this isn't right, is actually okay or good or loving. Right? So it's very much looking at that. And the people that I found that had some issues with this book, because what an appearance of an age gap, right? The truth is the character of Kyle, although looking about 1670s and 136 years old, pretty apparent really fast for her because she's super smart, very trained in this stuff. But there's a connection between them and there's a connection that goes on from past lives as well. There's a lot of stuff in that, but she has to learn how to step up, how to value herself, how to value doing something that is good and right. And I will tell you that the legal, the legal filing is partially something that I dealt with. And the reason I left family. So I do bring my life into this and things that I've experienced. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that you should. I feel it's hiding my life and things like I would never be bold enough to write an autobiography. I just hide it. I'm not that, I'm not that bright, but it also allows you to, to give voice to people you wanted to give voice to. So in the third book, standing fireflies, the one that sat in the South, there's, I put characters in this with people I knew and people that, for example, one of the characters, I gave her a good ending because she, she was a good friend of mine and she got my first job and she actually got killed by people who came into her house and killed her and stuffed her body into an oil. Gosh. Yeah. And she was a beautiful woman and a wonderful person and she didn't have a life. So I wanted to give her a chance to have a life. And so I put her in this, I put my uncle who was a stutterer shows up as a character in this. So this one is very much a lot of my friends and family. And the, it does talk about the really horrible systemic racist, not systemic, just awful racism in the South at that time. The separation was driven so much by the powers in control. There was a lot of cultural commonality between the poor working class white people and the African Americans kept separate. Absolutely. As they are today. No, this is exactly what they're doing. What people will talk to political, but people in power, right? What they want to do is those who are those who actually achieve their wealth by having wealth before and just investing and having this history of wealth. They are, they are different from literally everybody else. Everybody who's working for a living. They're all pretty much the same and we all have the same goals and across the world. Right. When I went to China, I remember thinking that first time I went to China, I went by myself. It was the day after we bombed their embassy. Accidentally. I was like, I'm going to die, right? Here I am. I'm going to die. And I walked, walked through the airport, the guys in the communist outfits. And I was like, Oh yeah, they're taking me. It's going to happen. Can I get out of here? They're seeing me and I'm like, damn, I'm screwed. And I said, get out, make it through. And I go. And the first thing that happens is this little girl comes up to me and says in English, my grandmother would like me to practice English with you. And that was it. It's just people want, and she wanted it because it was good for her to learn English better to get. And people just want to have their family take care of people that they love. We all have these very basic needs and very basic wants. And it's when people start getting that thing for power, that's when things start going real wrong. And there we are. Absolutely. And you have me right there. I will not challenge you on that at all. When it comes to mine, it's called the Free State of Jones. If you've never seen it, check it out. It stars Matthew McConaughey. And that pulls out everything you just said. Free State of Jones, Matthew McConaughey. Check it out. So now you've got the fifth book that's coming out this fall. What's the name of that book? Limerence. Limerence. Okay. And so what is that? This is the Limerence. Series. What does that mean? So Limerence is the type of falling in love that people do that people consider crazy. It's like when you meet someone and it's like you're just overwhelmed and it makes you nuts. Vincent van Gogh cutting off the ear stuff, right? But when I looked at this, I'm questioned, I questioned that because of the nature of attractions, right? Is it always that, or is that something that's almost chemical and biological? There's a lot of physics in this series as well, but you don't even have to really think about it. It's just, it's basically told to you so you don't have to worry about it that much. But the second book, Bright Midnights is about attraction in all of its forms, good, bad, and ugly. And this book Limerence coming out is seeing the other side of the story. So up to this point that you've seen these characters, the point of view characters have been Emily, who's a 17 year old girl in Bright Midnights, Sarah, who's a woman in her forties and Veronica, who is a woman in her early twenties. And they've been in ghosty academies back to Emily's point of view, but when she's older, she's like in her thirties. Okay. And you've seen the paranormal stuff that's been around them, shadowing them things that happen. You learn a bit more about it in Bright Midnights, but in ghosty academy, you learn about these agencies involved in controlling power in the world. And so there's one that they're all encountering. And this one says this other group is evil and Limerence is showing you the other side. Right. And those characters from Limerence show up in Fanning Fireflies. You see them a little bit. There's a lot of crossover in my books. I have spreadsheets all over the place. Oh, wow. I can't even imagine. Yes. Definitely. You said you can read the first three in any order. They're on Kindle Unlimited. Oh, okay. Okay. I think I've got my Kindle. I think I'm going, I'm really intrigued by Fanning Fireflies. Definitely. And so the other books that are in the editing process, give us just a little overview of how those three are going to come to play. And will that in your series? So in the series will end in the eighth book, but there will be, because this is a full world and because you meet a lot of people in it, there are side stories that come from their stories. So right now I'm actually writing a book, a new book about one of the characters that you see in Ghost in the Cabin. It's her backstory. Like I'm an author who everybody I put on page because I'm neurotic. I have, I know their full backstory. I can tell, I'm not making crap up. And if I don't know, I will tell you, I don't know. But that, I could write in this world for literally 20 years. There's that much in it. It took you six years. So definitely make the most of this world. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, wow. I can tell you, I can tell you for the next few books, I can't tell you too much because it's because I'd be giving too much away, but I can tell you the point of the characters. In Limerence that comes out in the fall, the point of view of character is a person who hadn't had the floor before, which is Dante, who is a ghost. And then, and he's so much more, a ghost and so much more. He actually was when he died, he was in Carthage and he was from Tunisia originally. We're going ancient times. Yeah. And, and then Kara is his partner and she was all, she was actually from that same kind of time. And the, they're the point, he's the point of view and she, she has created this thing. And then for the book after that is called mirrored lands. The point of view is Emily again, there's the one, one from Bretman nines, but also a character I can't tell you about because it's really a surprise. And then the next book after that is called outliers and it is point of view of Sarah again and Dante. And then the last book is called Verite and it's got three points of view, but I can't really talk about this. And that's it. So wow. Wow. I just love this. I just love this. This is very fascinating to me. And so I'm sure all of these will be very fascinating to my listeners and my blog readers, because you could literally take one and move on if you wanted to, because the first three are not to be read in order or anything like that. But, Oh, what a beautiful cover. These are the pretty shiny covers. By the way, I will be at New York comic con this year. Oh, really? What is that? It is October 9th through 12th. Okay. This is Fanny Fireflies. The pretty cover. Oh, another beautiful. Oh, that's beautiful. I love these new covers. I love them. Oh, beautiful. And the edges. Have you seen the books with the beautiful edges? Yes. I thought about that, but I haven't done it yet. Oh, it's beautiful. Okay. All right. So now I'm going to go get out. As if I'm not reading like eight books right now at the same time. I admire that a lot. This is why this channel is called Bookaholic. I have a problem. I'm telling you, Lexi, thank you so much for joining me today. I think your book and thought processes about your book are totally fascinating. But of course you came from UNC Chapel Hill. So yes. And so what we'll do is we'll have in our podcast, show notes and in the video description box on YouTube, we'll have your information, links to your books, et cetera. Lexi, thank you so much for joining me from Paris, France. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.