Carrie Maldonado – Writer

I always knew I should have killed Stephen.  Don’t get me wrong, he was a great guy.  Committed Dad, loving husband (okay, widower after I killed his wife).  I was the one who first brought him to the party, and I was very fond of him, but it was always the plan to kill him.  And it was a glorious, honorable death.  I felt good about it.  Stephen had to go.  At least, until my critique group caught wind of it.   Maybe I’d done too good a job of emphasizing Stephen’s greatness.  Since I’d be killing him, I had made him admittedly one dimensional.  I didn’t need to get into the fact that maybe he was a little egotistical about his intellect, and he definitely had been a little short sighted testing his cancer cure on his seven year old son, even if it had worked.  But I didn’t care to show his flaws, because he was going to die in the beginning of chapter three.  This was my first book, The Dobson Project, and I bowed to the pressure and Stephen lived!  Unfortunately, this meant substantial plot revisions. Although this meant Drew didn’t have to be an orphan any longer, I still sometimes think…shoulda killed Stephen!