Writing Violence Without Glory: Real Threat, Real Cost
Why I don't glorify violence in The Alpha Flame, even though Maggie can fight.
Writing Violence Without Glory
Violence in fiction often gets treated like a shortcut to drama. A fight makes things “exciting,” right? But that’s not the kind of story I wanted to tell.
The Alpha Flame was always meant to be raw, real, and unflinching. Even though Maggie Grant is a 3rd dan black belt, I refused to turn her into an action hero with cool moves for the reader’s entertainment. I didn’t want her fights to feel like a cinematic fantasy. I wanted them to feel true, messy, frightening, and costly.
Just as I wrote sex in this book without apology, but with consequences, I wrote violence without glory. Maggie can hurt someone. She knows exactly how. But that doesn’t make it safe or empowering in the way people think. It’s knowledge she carries like a burden, knowing what it means to injure, dominate, or end a threat.
When you train for years, you don’t just learn how to fight, you learn when not to. That’s why her black belt isn’t a superpower in this story. It’s credibility. It explains why she’s alert, wary, always scanning for danger. It’s a survival instinct forged in discipline. But it’s also something that haunts her, because she knows exactly what she’s capable of doing if she has to.
Violence in The Alpha Flame was never going to be a power fantasy. It was going to be honest. Because real violence changes people. It exposes their fear, their desperation, their need to survive. It tells you who they are when there’s nowhere to hide.
The Cost of Violence
Violence isn’t a clever plot twist or a cool special effect. Even if you "win," it marks you. That’s why I refused to give readers easy victories or slick choreography. Maggie knows how to hurt people, but she knows the cost, the guilt, the fear, the risk that you don’t walk away unscarred.
In this story, violence is never a joke. It’s survival. It’s a desperate choice when every other option is gone. And even when you do the “right” thing, you have to live with it. I wanted readers to feel that weight. To understand that you can’t hit someone without it hitting you back in some way, emotionally, psychologically, morally.
Maggie’s black belt doesn’t make her a badass for applause. It makes her someone who knows where to aim, what it would do, and how hard it is to live with that knowledge. That’s the truth of real self-defense, it’s not about being the strongest in the room, it’s about choosing not to fight unless you have to.
This was my promise to you as a reader: no spectacle, no sanitized lie. Just a raw, honest look at the kind of violence that leaves real scars. Maggie Grant is tough, but she's also haunted. Because in The Alpha Flame, survival isn’t clean. It’s complicated, and it always comes at a price.