Episode #333: When Dying Is Your Story's HEA {1}

This pic was taken the day after the juvenile bear invasion. At least once a year we find deer in our backyard chilling out.

Today's post features a topic: killing off a major character, that I had originally written for Facebook, but due to circumstances beyond my control (hack/scam attempt using Meta's own services, among other things), I decided to hold it and a dozen others at bay for the time being.

This will be a three part series, as I had specifically designed it to be on Facebook. In fact, I have gotten pretty good at keeping within the specific parameters I had created for myself: nor more than seventeen lines per post, which translates to about 220 +/- words. Without further ado, here is part of one of how I went about killing off a major character.

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I never really had an issue with killing off minor characters in my stories, since they were mostly disposable pieces that primarily moved the story along (see my novella "The Mortality of Familial Love"), nor did I suffer emotionally when killing a major character as a realistic consequence for the life he was living (see my novella "To Live Is To Die Young"). I think the main reason for my reaction to them boils down to that they were simply stand-alones.

However, killing off a major character(s) in a series is always a risky proposition. You don't want a series of any length to not have someone suffer the consequences of their actions, but by the tail side of the coin, you don't want to have someone die without it have a lasting effect on the story.

In this series, it was inevitable that at least one major character was going to die and their death was going to affect the rest of the story in a myriad of ways.

My issue at the time, was deciding which major character(s) I was going to 1} kill off; 2} how I was going to present the immediate aftermath; and 3} how the story would unfold for the remaining two books.

Note: the climatic battle scene takes place in book #3, which sets the stage for the remaining two volumes.

(to be continued)

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