Speculating Canada Reviews EVIL

There's another review of EVIL? out on the web! This one comes courtesy of Speculating Canada, and can be found here.

The review, written by new best friend Derek Newman-Stille, focuses on the anti-bullying aspects of the book. This is amusing to me, because anti-bullying hadn't been foremost in my mind when I wrote it. Indeed, I'd been given a directive from my editors to write about something other than the kid who gets picked on; anti-bullying had been a very strong theme in Attack of the Intergalactic Soul Hunters, and a minor theme in Epoch, and they felt I needed to 'grow as a writer'. Stuart is the victim of bullying, however. It may have been brought on by supernaturally-enhanced religious zeal, but it's still bullying. Turns out I did write another book about the picked-on kid! I'm grateful to Derek for noticing and pointing that aspect out. It's a theme I'm not done with, not by a long shot.

Since this post is about EVIL?, let me take a moment to remind everyone about the short story sequel I wrote, Walk of Evil, which can be found here.

If you haven't already checked it out, please do so immediately!

Cupid War Fans, Don't Forget...

My new short story, The Cupid War: Fallon's First Couple featuring Fallon and Caleb, will be posted here in less than three days! Don't miss this charming expansion of the Cupid War universe, the perfect sweetener for when your Halloween candy runs out. ;)

Based on The Truth?

Writers always weave their personal stories in with their fiction. It's one of the things that makes each author different (and bad authors that much easier to spot). Be it a person, a place, a thing or an event, not a single experience in a writer's life is ever wasted - not when it can be used to make their work feel more real.

My recent short story,Walk of Evil, and my upcoming The Cupid War: Fallon's First Couple, are great examples of my fiction combined with my life. My Cupid War short story, due to be released here on November 1, is a fictional retelling of how I met my wife. Not all the details are exactly the same, but Violet and I did meet at a spoken word event hosted by a mutual friend, and we each saw the other perform on stage before we'd been introduced.

Walk of Evil combined a number of things, such as my familiarity with Orillia and my love of Tim Horton's. The reason the story came to be was my chance meeting with a very devout woman at a church service attended by my cousins. This woman gave a talk about some of the things she'd done, including her 'faith walks' around mosques (with the intent of opening Muslim eyes to the Truth), and her efforts to cure gay people. Taking that brief impression and molding it into the character of Meredith (Walk of Evil's antagonist) was as easy as it was rewarding. If I see her again, I should thank her. Maybe. She did, after all, give me so much material to work with.

People often ask me if they're going to end up in a story of mine someday. The answer isn't no, but it's not exactly yes, either. Not all people are as ripe for spoofing as that faith walker was. I get bits of character from all over, and work them in when I need them. When it came to Meredith, the bit I took was bigger than most.

In the end, of course, it's all fiction. There is truth in fiction, however - each author presents the world as they see it in their work. That's what makes fiction feel true, which is important for drawing readers in. And, when you write supernatural fiction as often as I do, you need all the truth you can get!

Killing Characters and Fixing Mistakes

I just killed off a minor character. Then I brought him back. One of my main characters stabbed him. And then he didn't. It occurred to me that the stabbing was a possibility, so I gave it a go for a couple of sentences. It was sudden and completely unexpected, but it wasn't quite right. That, and I didn't really know what to do with it. So I took it out. I turned back time. You can do that, when you're an author. Sometimes, though, it takes a lot more than a couple of sentences for me to realize I've gone the wrong way. Once, I had to excise an entire chapter to fix a mistake. More recently, I had to chop about five chapters from a novel. And, both Evil and Epoch required a three-chapter rewrite near their ends to correct some serious gaffes (that my editors caught, not me). Mistakes happen. Even in writing! Even when you're still in the super-creative, make-it-all-up part of the process. Realizing you've made one is actually a sign that you're doing something right; you know your characters and story well enough to detect when something's wrong. It's a gut thing, for the most part. Trust your gut. Try things out. One way might look right; go for the one that feels right. The one that feels like it's part of the story. That minor character of mine gets to live. It wasn't his time to go. Not yet. I killed off a major character instead. I'm a whole chapter past that point now, and still going. It works. The story is happy. So am I.