My editor just emailed me another endorsement from one of the folks we sent the manuscript to. I’m so excited! This one’s from Kage Baker. I’m a total stranger to three of the four that have responded so far. It continually amazes me how generous the pros in this genre are with both their time
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If we root against villains based on moral judgments, then how is it possible to root for heroes who are not just bad boys but down right criminal, e.g. hitmen, mobsters, thieves? It’s a wonderful question that has a simple and revealing explanation. We root for these bad guys because they’re really good. What?! When talking about bad
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GENUS & SPECIES I think there are a few facets to the question posed in the title. But before we get to that, I think we need to define what a villain is. A villain is a type of antagonist. Every story has an antagonist, someone or something that opposes the hero or heroine, even if it’s the setting
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I eschewed Dean Koontz for many years because Dean Koontz was, in my mind, a horror writer. And I’d written horror off as a genre that was not to my taste when, in the early 1990’s, I read a story about a woman with metal teeth who lured men to her lonely house and bit off their penises.
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If I’d known Cormac McCarthy’s The Road had won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007, I might not have picked it up. So many books that have won the award just bore my underpowered literary sensibilities to death. Luckily, I’d listened to McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses a few years ago and enjoyed it. So when I saw the audio book,
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