Episode #335: When Dying Is Your Story's HEA {3}

Had another visitor in the backyard the other day (7/10). This was one of three pics and a seventeen second video clip that I took that day. About a minute later, they made an exit to the neighbor's back yard with a graceful leap over the fenxe.

I certainly do love living next to a mountain.

~~~~

This last post was, at the time, acknowledging something that I initially thought would never really happen to me: genuinely caring about the characters that I had created for a given novel.

to be perfectly frank, with all of the stories that I had previously written, the level of caring about my characters shown by me in this series, was basically non-existent. Don't get  me wrong, I cared about the characters in my stories, but not to the lever that I had with these characters.

So, without further ado, here is part three of our original FB series covering how I chose to kill off a few major characters.

Let me tell you, killing off characters that you have grown to love as a writer is hard. It's doubly so when the story requires you to show that sometimes the consequences for a particular action can have a spidering effect.

I can safely say that the aftermath of both characters' deaths affected everyone profoundly, both in the story and the person who had to write it. For me personally, even though I considered these two specific story arcs (out of the estimated fifteen the entire series contained) to be some of my best writing, nearly three years later, and numerous re-reads for editing, it still moves me to tears.

I think as a writer, if you can write something, like an entire storyline that makes you emotional, you should high five yourself. Because if you can become emotional at the deaths of two major characters, imagine how your readers will react to it.

I'm not sure if I'll be pulling any more of my unpublished FB posts for my blog, because I'm nearly certain that the topics that I had wrote about for FB were covered nearly two years ago on this blog. But I did want to pull this unpublished posts and publish them here, as I don't believe I've read anywhere about killing off a major character in a story before.

But I did want to share my thoughts on how difficult of a decision it was, and the aftermath of that decision, and how deeply it has affected me, and continues to affect me some three years later.

A fantastic Monday (or Tuesday and beyond) to one and all.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved