It's a Family, After All!

So naturally, seeing the title of my last post involved brothers, my sister read it, and sent me an email, noting how interesting it was to "learn about how a writer thinks and perceives the world."  So naturally I wrote back to her, and once again thought you'd like to share in some of the thoughts.  Again, it's slightly paraphrased for your benefit.  (Isn't it fun to "read" someone else's mail?)

I promise I'll stop talking about The Siliphore after this post (for a while, anyway, until the 3rd book has been published.)

I was chatting with a friend who's a real whirlwind - always busy and she's a sort of "girly girl" in many ways. She's very affectionate and chatty and feminine and romantic, and I said to her that it's too bad she's too busy to sit down with a book because she'd really enjoy mine - she'd absolutely fall in love with the characters and become very emotionally involved with everything that happens to them.


I'm hoping this will happen to everyone who reads The Siliphore - even those people who don't really go in for fantasy. That's what makes any genre of book a good experience - if the reader cares what happens to the characters. All my characters are very real, complete people with principles and foibles; strengths and weaknesses that they act upon in a real way that any of us might emulate. Hey, even my "bad guy" isn't all bad - nobody is. He too is a very real, and in many ways attractive person.

This is NOT a "dungeons and dragons" sort of story. It's not a modern world but it's not a world with "magic", either. Just one basic factor makes it fantasy instead of just...literature.

I hope you do buy the book and I hope you love it enough to tell your friends both face to face and online to buy and read it, too because it's my own exploration of many things we all think about, and I think there's a lot of wisdom in it.   The story explores things like the nature of God, how people meet the challenges confronting them, and how they try to change to become what the world needs them to be. It also deals with the different ways people face the death of a loved one, and how they meet and cope with betrayal, and how sometimes they strike back and sometimes they're forced to understand how damaging that can be and that they really shouldn't strike back. It shows people struggling to put someone else's needs before their own, and sometimes they fail at that.  It also deals with the various facets, the pain, the joy and the sacrifices of love.  Oh, it's a very complete world with far more real issues for the characters to face than unreal ones!

Can you tell that I REALLY like what I've written and want to share it with you?  Well, yeah - that's the way it ought to be, isn't it.