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| Did Shakespeare angst over killing off Romeo and Juliet? |
Since the
publication of her first novel in 1989, Toni V. Sweeney divides her time
between writing SF/Fantasy under her own name and romances under her pseudonym
Icy Snow Blackstone. She also works as publicity manager for Class Act Books
and is on the review staff of the New York Journal of Books and the paranormal
Romance Guild. In 2016, she was named a Professional Reader by netgalley.com.
Find out more about Toni and her books at here.
Death and the Main Character
Never let it be said authors
aren’t emotionally tied to their characters, no matter how important or how
minor to the plot those characters may be.
It seemed simple enough.
One of my characters ran
away from home as a child...led an adventurous but dissolute life...contracted
a terminal disease. I'd decided he would return home, be welcomed back into the
family fold, a cure would be found...and he'd live happily ever after.
It didn't work out that way.
The minute he staggered
through the door, it hit me. He's going
to die! "But I don't want it this way!" I shouted aloud, pushed
away from the computer, and did a terribly embarrassing and stupid thing.
I put my hands to my face
and burst into tears.
A little dramatic perhaps,
but that's the way it happened. I had just killed off one of my main characters—and
I didn't even intend to.
As I typed, I realized it
had to be, because his death would influence the other characters from then on.
The character who died? Cash,
my hero’s stepson, one of the second-string main characters.
Acashi Day-lin makes his first
appearance in Sinbad's Last Voyage. At
that time, he’s fourteen, the son of Andrea Talltrees and Tran Day, a handsome
man-child with his father's startling semi-Asian looks. In that book, Cash
doesn't take up many pages. When we meet him, he's sitting on the front porch
of his mother's farmhouse, trying to absorb the fact that his world has just
collapsed because his father is a fugitive, accused of being a spy and a
smuggler named Sinbad sh'en Singh has taken his mother off-planet to search for
him. His only other appearance is in the last chapter when he’s instrumental in
reuniting Sin and Andi minutes before she gives birth to Sin’s son, but in
those pages, he gives Sinbad a glimpse of future troubles to come.
In Sinbad's Wife, Cash has further adjustments. He now has a
stepfather who is dying and a stepbrother, Adam Lawless, his partner in crime.
While Sin is hospitalized, Cash and Adam raid the cookie jar and take
themselves to Old Town to lose their virginity in an evening of teenage lust. When
Andi is kidnapped by slavers, they enlist in the Space Guard to help bring her
back. Confronted by his father, Cash has to make a choice between killing Tran
or being called a coward by the man who sired him.
Fortunately, he’s saved from
becoming a murderer by his stepfather.
Sinbad's Pride finds Cash a randy sixteen-year-old with hormones in overdrive, just
beginning to emerge into the potential of a full-grown Serapian male. He runs
away with Sin's concubine, only to find himself a single parent of twins,
abandoned by his lover and forced to become an adult overnight as he is faced
with the most difficult decision of all—how to provide for his children. Desperately,
he sends them to Sinbad, begging him not to make them suffer for his sins.
Eighteen years have passed
in Sinbad's Triumph. No longer the
brash, ready-for-a-fight youngster, Cash is now thirty-seven, a weary but
well-known mercenary dying of a terminal disease contracted during an
unprotected back-alley encounter with a prostitute. He wants to go home, wants
to see the sun come up over the mountains, wants to sit with his little sister
N'Sagar as he used to when he would tell her he was making the sun come up just
for her. With the help of N'Sagar and a doctor-monk from the Brotherhood of St
Luke, he makes the journey back to Felida. Cash meets his children, Drea and
Tran, discovering they have made him into a hero. He makes his peace with Sin,
and everyone waits for the inevitable.
That was Cash’s history, and
the reason I was so shocked by the way his story unfolded, albeit unwilling
under my typing fingers. I had heard of characters taking over a story, of the
story going off on tangents the author didn’t expect, but I’d never had it
happen to me…until now.
Don’t think it didn’t hurt
to write those lines. It wasn’t simply a matter of coldly finishing off a
character, then pressing “Save” and going on to something else.
It hurt…and there was real
emotional pain involved. What I had done lingered with me for days. I moped
around as if a real person had died, someone I’d known and cared for. I delayed
writing the rest of the novel. For a long time, I wavered in trying to decide
if I should change the ending and give an eleventh hour rescue. At last, after
much thought, I rationalized that Cash was, after all, just a fictional
character, and I was being silly acting this way. I decided to leave the story
as it was. It was more lifelike…
…after all, there aren’t
many last-minute rescues in life, are there?
I've killed off other characters
since (and some of them truly deserved it), but none affected me like Cash's
death. Perhaps it's the fact that he was the first, or that I wrote into his
passing my own first-hand, heart-wrenching experience of witnessing the death
of someone I loved. Whatever the reason, killing off a character you've created
from childhood to adulthood is a traumatic experience. I wouldn’t advise it as
a matter of course; it's like losing a friend—and it stays with you.
Sinbad's Triumph will be released March 15. The other novels in the Adventures of Sinbad series are available as ebooks at Amazon and
other major e-tailers. The paperback version is sold exclusively on the
publisher’s website.
Sinbad’s Pride
The Adventures of Sinbad, Book 4
Being a family man doesn’t mean
life’s over.
Sinbad sh’en Singh returns to his
former occupation, with help from a loophole in Felida’s treaty…which means the
Federation can’t do a thing about it.
The Fed may not be a threat, but wife
Andi is. She doesn’t want a smuggler for a husband. Domestic bliss is a thing
of the past.
Things get even rockier when two of
the pride chiefs offer their daughters as concubines to the pride chief’s heir.
It’ll take a great deal of sweet talk to make Andi agree to that!
Then there’s that smuggler who
received Sin’s territories, and won’t give them up without a fight…
…and a new leaf is discovered on
Sin’s empty family tree.
Overconfident as always, Sin’s sure
he can handle it all…except for Andi. Bringing her around will be his biggest
challenge.
