Cold Comfort is in final draft stage, and I’m happy with what I’ve done with the character of Wanda, the ‘sidekick’ of my first novel, The Girl on the Mountain. Wanda as a child was charming, spontaneous, and shocking to her elders. Cold Comfort takes place fifteen years later. My first problem was how to transition Wanda to a grown-up. […]
It’s been noted before that one of the pleasures of writing fiction is to create and populate a world. How God-like! But novelists get to go farther than God, because they’re engaged in the business of fiction. Without someone manipulating every word and deed, fiction has no life. Writers have control, baby. So writers get to project events as they’d
The Novelist as Control Freak Read More »
When I was told several times that my main character’s sidekick was stealing the show, I decided to make her the main character of the next story. In the first one (The Girl on the Mountain) Wanda is 13, abused and homeless, but resilient, wise, and strong-willed. In that story she’s a contrast to the older, somewhat naive main character
Wanda, the sidekick who nearly stole the show Read More »
