#writerlife101: Who is your favorite hero that you’ve written?

This is a very difficult question to answer. All writers say this, but it’s true, trying to answer a question like this is like trying to decide which of your children is your favorite. Nearly impossible because you love them all.

Still, if I absolutely had to choose I think I would say, Patrick, from the as yet unpublished novella written during the 3-Day Novel Contest in 2016, is my favorite. The book is set in a fantasy world very light on magic that has, in recent years, developed its first gun technology, and is in the early stages of improvement and adoption of said tech.

In that book, our hero comes to the trade city of Olthetta determined to hire on as a mercenary, only to discover that he isn’t cut out for the life of a fighting man and end up homeless. His life of living penniless on the streets comes to an end when he lands a job at a bookstore, but he is never the same for it.

A life around books changes him into a thinking man, one who doesn’t like what he sees in the government of his new city. The book features a romantic storyline, and the kick-butt journalist he falls for draws Patrick into a struggle to bring back justice through the written word (and a little gunfire, when necessary).

Why Patrick? Because Patrick is flawed but changes very profoundly throughout the book. He starts off a man set in his ways, naive about the world and willing to blame others for the hardships life throws at him. By the time he comes around to helping spark the fire of revolution, he’s changed into a person who takes responsibility for his actions, jumps to explore different avenues of thought, but still with the same strength of conviction.

I very much enjoy Patrick’s arc of positive change in a negative world, even as the cards are increasingly stacked against him. There’s a lot for readers to relate to, and, I believe, be inspired by.

Hopefully you’ll all get to meet Patrick in the near future. Getting this short book edited, polished and released is a project I’m currently pursuing during my Friday side project days. Also getting it titled, since it’s becoming a bit cumbersome to always refer to it as “the book I wrote during the 3-Day Novel Contest”, hahaha.