BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--GUEST AUTHOR GEORGINA LEE

Barbara Phinney writes under her real name and as Georgina Lee. She lives in New Brunswick, Canada, with her semi-retired husband, who has never been in her book, nor ever been killed off.  But she's considered it sometimes. Learn more about Barbara/Georgina at her website and blog.

Hello, it's Barbara Phinney here. I recently dug an unedited book out from deep in my hard drive and edited it.

I love this story, entitled Death on the Ocean Floor, by my alter ego, Georgina Lee. But as I read through it, I noticed that some of my characters felt familiar. No, I've not used them before, but rather, they are based on real people I know. And considering that we authors always put at the beginning of our books that there is no resemblance to real people, I kind of cringed.

But really, authors, like everyone else in the world, connect with people. We get to know them, socialize with them, like them, and yes, even hate them. We're just normal, (well, as normal as a writer can get.) We can't write anything except that which has seeped into our unconscious thought and slipped out our fingers at the keyboard.

In Death on the Ocean Floor, my heroine is a lot like me. Poor thing. And the hero resembles a university student I once had a crush on, years (okay, decades) ago.

Their boss is a creepy mix of an old supervisor of mine and a guy I once worked with. The victim, a cousin. Yup. That one is a real person. And once you read the story, you're going to say, "No way, Barbara, no one is anyone really like that." Well, readers, yes, there are people like that, I hate to say.

I won't go through the whole cast of characters, but suffice it to say, I can relate all of them to real persons, and it bothers me. Thankfully, some are hybrids of several people, but some are purebreds. Though, I'm not sure what a writer can expect when a story needs telling. A novelist I know has a T-shirt that says, "Watch it or I will put you in my novel." I guess it's true.

Have you ever read a story and wondered how on earth the author came up with that character? Or recognized a character and wondered if the author has been stalking your town? Well, we don't do anything that bad, unless you count eavesdropping at coffee shops. But we do glean from our experiences to create characters, good, bad or like one of mine, ending up on the ocean floor.

All I can say is that I hope you see yourself in one of my books. As the hero or heroine, that is.

Death on the Ocean Floor

Warning! Salty language, tough heroine and other normal people and situations! From USA Today bestselling author, Georgina Lee! Gritty, honest characters. When park ranger, Tetra Martin, finds her roommate stabbed in a cave accessible only at low tide, she becomes the lead suspect. Her acerbic tongue and mouthiness don't help her case. Who does help is her hunky supervisor, David Haines. But finding a killer proves difficult when the suspect list swells like the rising tide, and someone wants Tetra washed away. Literally.

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