K.M. Jackson on the Second in her Sugar Lake Series, Too Sweet To Be Good

Readers of As Good As The First Time (Dafina 2018) fell in love with Sugar Lake, the small Georgia town at the heart of K.M. Jackson’s Sugar Lake series. Fell in love, and then arrived at the last page and had to leave. Nearly a year, they waited before they could return to Sugar Lake, and to Aunt Joyce’s bakeshop, Goode ‘N Sweet. Nearly a year since they met New Yorkers Alexandrea and Olivia Gale, come south to help Aunt Joyce and, in Olivia’s case, to get pulled back into a relationship she’d left behind years ago.

Life in Sugar Lake didn’t stop when the first book ended; Jackson couldn’t let it. “To me when I finish a book, they are still very much alive in my head going about their day to day and still living very full lives, if that makes sense,” she said. This sense of continuity allows Jackson to more easily pick up when it’s time to write the next book in the series, in this case Too Sweet To Be Good (Dafina 2019), which follows Alexandrea Gale navigating a new creative project in Sugar Lake while dealing with her boss’s challenging, handsome son. 

Pulling Readers Back In … and Keeping Them There

Some of the work of writing a series necessarily comes with writing the first book, including creating the world the characters move through. A memorable place (Sugar Lake), one with distinct features (Aunt Joyce’s bakeshop, the lake house, the old Redheart Theater), will stay with a reader when they finish the first book, offering them quick entry when it’s time to start reading the next. Jackson worked hard during book one to create just that kind of strong setting.  “I wanted Sugar Lake to feel like that kind of place, one where it seems like you’re returning to someplace familiar, even if you’ve been away for a while,” she said.

A particular challenge series authors face writing subsequent books is generating something that at once feels a part of the familiar world of book one, while also introducing new narrative elements. For Jackson, this newness comes from characters. “The hero, Kellen, was new and so much fun to create. In As Good As The First Time, he was only this vague thought of a character with maybe one mention, so I got to know him just the same as the readers did.” Jackson also pulled secondary characters from book one into the foreground for book two, most notably the Too Sweet’s heroine, Alexandrea.

Move Quickly, But Not Too Quickly

Pacing requires hard, thoughtful work on the part of any writer, but presents a double challenge for a romance novelist. She must keep the narrative moving forward, yes, but also she must build tension through parceling out the romance, parceling out the sweet moments. “With romance, there needs to be that push and pull to make a relationship exciting, just like in real life. It’s the tension that brings the sizzle and attraction.”

The books in the Sugar Lake series are what are known as “sweet romances.” In short, the characters do not use profanity, and they do not have on-the-page sex (though they can have it behind closed doors). Jackson, who also writes other romances, said sweet romances require a particularly strong sense of balance. Despite the lack of sex, “I still very much wanted to show there was a sexual attraction between my two main characters and didn’t want to shy away from that. I decided to do it more in looks, touches and glances, and at time with words, which I find can be so much more sexy than actual physical actions.”

Readers clearly like Jackson’s romance, pacing, and everything else about her series; they’re calling for more. She’d love to write book three, though nothing is finalized and she’s currently focused on Real Men Knit is the first in her new, sexy Harlem Knitting series, to be published by Berkley Romance under her name, Kwana Jackson. Look for it on bookshelves next May.

Find K.M. Jackson online at kmjackson.com and on Twitter @KwanaWrites.

Read Spine’s piece on Jackson’s first Sugar Lake book, As Good As The First Time.

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