The Two Archer Mills

The character, Archer Mills has been kicking around in a number of stories that I've begun writing and then abandoned. He has been rather mercurial over the past three years, popping up here and there and then landing in two different novels.

His first appearance as a main character was in The Worth of a Woman (August 2018) as the anti hero, a brutal, often cruel young man who gradually realizes that females have value and are not just objects for men to use and abuse according to their whims.

The second coming of Archer Mills is as a main character in the newly published Cherry (November 2019) where he is not the nicest of young men at first glance, but when violence erupts in his girlfriend's family and he finds himself in the thick of it, he begins to show his true character. He wrestles with his own issues while doing everything he can to save Charlotte Forbes, whom he realizes is the Forbes sister he really loves, from self destructing in the wake of her world crashing all around her.

As confusing as the two Archer Mills characters may be to anyone who may happen to read both books because they share a name, they are two distinctly different characters. I suppose, as in real life, there are many John Joneses, many James Browns, many Tom Smiths, many Archer Mills. It doesn't mean anything other than he was a multifaceted character in his origin and I wanted to examine him, dark side and light side.

One of my quirks as an author is that I reinvent characters. I like exploring their dark side and then flipping them over and exposing the other side of their nature.