I suppose each time I release a new book, I continue to have lingering thoughts about any new characters I created and it’s no different with Shades of Deception

I did break away from the “Shades” series to do other writing as I mentioned in the last post. Not that I wanted a break from Bev Henderson per se; it was merely because I became involved in a couple of unexpected projects. Anyway, this was one of those situations in which three different characters who were intended to be somewhat incidental “grew” in importance. In one case, the expansion of the role was a logical step to take based on Chapter One rather than introducing a new character in some later chapters.

The other two came about in an interesting way. When I was working through the proper procedures to follow when there is a fatality in diving (very low odds, but it does happen), one of the guys I was talking with asked a question about what character he was “enacting” for me. At the time, I told him he could be either the good guy or the jerk (using another term I won’t put into the blog). He opted for the good guy and that set me to thinking later about how I could modify the character to bring about a plot twist I hadn’t fully mapped out in the beginning. Since I chose to use the same method in Deception as I did in Shades of Truth of the reader knowing the killer early on, the intricacy had to come in how the truth was ultimately revealed. Changing the once “minor character” worked out quite well.

The final character “expansion” came about because I literally had a “gap” in tying up some loose ends and that’s related to an author’s choice of Point of View – POV. One of the early decisions an author has to make is what POV to use and I’m a bit old-fashioned in that way. I write mostly in third-person, although I actually enjoy first person more in some ways. (A subject for a future post.) In general, I tend to use “dual voice”  of the protagonist and an antagonist. That, however, doesn’t always sync well toward the end of the novel. I was running into that working through the final chapters for Deception and enhancing the one character’s role solved the problem.