Based on celebrity news these days, one might think George
R.R. Martin is late delivering his next book because he’s too busy killing off
well-known entertainers. Scott Weiland, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Alan Rickman -
those are just the ones I’m a big fan of. We also lost Lemmy Kilmister, Dan
Haggerty, Meadowlark Lemon, Natalie Cole, Wayne Rogers, and Robert Loggia in
the past two months just to name a few.
Death is always tough to accept despite the fact we all must
face it in the end. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one or the loss of someone
famous that we admire, we have to come to grips with the fact that our memories
and their past deeds are all we’ll have of them going forward.
Although my little known debut novel Storm Orphans received positive reviews, I caught some flak from several
readers over the deaths of a few major characters. I actually consider this
something of a compliment. If they cared about their demise, that means they
cared about the characters themselves. That in turn means I did at least part
of my job as a writer. In the end, no matter how well laid out a plot might be,
if the reader isn’t invested in the characters, they aren’t truly invested in
the book.
My WIP (that’s “work in progress” for any of your
non-acronymers out there) is MG fiction. MG stands for middle grade which is
the term used for books geared mainly toward readers ages 8-12. Given that
audience, you won’t find a lot of death in this one, but yes, it’s still there.
I’m hoping to make a much larger splash in the literary pool with this book. I
plan to go the traditional route: entice a good agent via a well-worded query
letter and then participate in the necessary voodoo rituals with said agent in
order to obtain a deal with a top publisher. If that fails, I may just go door
to door visiting elementary school libraries and leaving copies behind like a
paperback-planting Johnny Appleseed.
No matter what happens, I promise a story with characters
you’ll care about. Winter may indeed be coming both to Atlanta this weekend and
to HBO this April, but my next book has a decidedly sunnier outlook.
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