This week we're asking ourselves if we have to kill characters for there to be sufficient risk to maintain reader interest. What other threats work better or just as effectively?
Tuesday, May 18, 2021
Do Characters HAVE To Die?
This week we're asking ourselves if we have to kill characters for there to be sufficient risk to maintain reader interest. What other threats work better or just as effectively?
![](http://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF1XR5eWRmjcx0y3tejTAMz51cK7xUIHdzHEC4lTpZOUc0N7JcdfNhTPkk1YkRz-x-kzxL7Rxz-Pqj3URcoZQTiyVIKWWUBkUvFDRSmgiZYYYJYZj1hMT2yfztffj_eos/s113/1.png)
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Friday, October 2, 2020
Day's End
Sunset out the back tonight. We don't normally get vibrant sunrises or sunsets in Florida. It's a land, sea, and sky of pastels. Colors washed out and faded by the sun, mostly. And then, this.
Most of us enjoy sunsets. We'll pause to marvel at the exuberant color and texture brought on by the day's death. Some of us make a ritual of stopping for the sunset, taking a seat to watch the show with a beverage at hand.
Why then do so many of us falter when faced with our loved ones' final days?
An uncle on my mother's side of the family lays in an ICU not all that far from here. Pneumonia. (Not Covid, not that it matters at this point.) The prognosis is grim. No one is allowed in to see him or sit with him or hold his hand. Not even his wife, my aunt. This is the part that Covid has stolen from us - the comfort and distraction of loved ones at a dying man's side. And you'd think that at this moment, that would be my aunt's sole occupation - worrying over her dying husband.
It isn't. It isn't, because it can't be. Not here. Not now. Not in this world where our lives have been forever altered by pandemic. No, at this moment, my aunt's worries are the business of dying. Who will pay the hospital bills. Where are the living will documents the doctors need should someone have to make the decision to pull life support. It's all lists and hurry and busy work.
There's no time (or safety) to sit at my uncle's bedside and pause of the final exuberant flush of life. Even without Covid, while we could sit at bedsides, most of us did so as a means of talking over death. We made timid small talk and watched shitty hospital TV to avoid the specter of death, no matter how close it hovered.
I don't say any of this to propose any kind of solution. Other than to maybe pause for a moment at endings of all kinds because sometimes there's breathtaking beauty to be found there.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Dead Is Dead - Or Is It?
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*kitty is not actually dead |
Do I get to pick pandemic??
Seriously, it’s kind of creepy that Calendar Maven K.A. Krantz picked this topic while we’re all practicing social distancing to #flattenthecurve on COVID-19—and she picked it months ago, before she could possibly know this would happen.
Or did she?
I mean, a global pandemic sounds like a great Evil Mastermind Plot…
Anyway, all of this is to day that I don’t really think about types of murder. Just not my thing. I occasionally have to kill off characters, but I tend to do it in efficient, not very interesting ways. I guess I figure dead is dead and I don’t have a lot of morbid curiosity about how to get people that way.
Probably this is why I don’t write murder mysteries.
Is this something you all pay attention to as readers? Are there more interesting deaths than others? Do you have a favorite fictional death?