Monday, July 11, 2016

My favorite minor character

First, sorry for the late start. Turns out my hard drive on my Imac is toast.
Moving on, trying to pick one minor character I liked best is tough, because I have a lot of novels and  most of them have stupid numbers of characters.

Instead of searching through each and every one of my books to find just the right character, I'm going to go to Mr.Mortimer Slate, an undertaker in my novel in progress BOOMTOWN. He's got all the charm in the world and it does him no good. He is an outcast not only because of his job but because he is an albino of mixed heritage living in a town where money is the only master.

Mr. Slate starts off normally enough, all things considered, but he changes through the course of the novel, becoming something he's not even sure he can describe.

He is also the busiest man in the town, burying body after body and often burying then a second or third time, all while desperately trying to find the supplies to bury them and the land to do so as well.

Poor Slate just wants a simple life, but it's not his place to have it. he shows up in several additional stories of mine, not as the main character but as a companion to my anti-hero Jonathan Crowley. Slate has no choice in the matter, because whatever it is that corrupted him (I ain't telling, but I know) is making him less human and Crowley is deciding whether or not he'll have to kill the man.

Slate shows up as Crowley's companion in "Black Train Blues," "Blank White Page," my novella "The Devoted," and in the chapbook "What Rough Beast," co-authored with Charles R. Rutledge.

Not a bad run for a minor character.