Friday, June 19, 2009

Sympathy for the villain

Yesterday I had an e-mail from a reader who'd just finished the final volume of "Promises to Keep". Her comments were warm and enthusiastic, and she's making her enthusiasm tangible by buying a copy of "A Second Chance", which she wants me to autograph it for her.

All of this is wonderful, but what I was perhaps most pleased about was her attitude to a particular character. He's not a likable character (to put it mildly), and earlier in the book this same reader was wishing him dead. But thoroughly evil characters are mercifully rare in real life, and I don't generally find them interesting in literature. I certainly have no desire to write one. Characters grow, and the reader grows in understanding of them. My correspondent told me almost apologetically that by the end she had tears in her eyes for this man.

It felt good.



The people at Lulu have adjusted their agreement with Amazon so that there's no longer an extra charge to buy my books via Amazon. This seems a good thing.

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