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Best selling author L.J. Sellers on when a character won’t let go

By Donna Galanti

I am thrilled to have best selling author on today L.J. Sellers.

Author L.J. Sellers

She is an award-winning journalist and the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, Passions of the Dead, and Dying for Justice. Her novels have been highly praised by Mystery Scene, Crimespree, and Spinetingler magazines, and the series has been on Amazon Kindle’s bestselling police procedural list.

L.J. also has three standalone thrillers: The Baby Thief, The Suicide Effect, and The Arranger. When not plotting murders, she enjoys performing standup comedy, cycling, social networking, and attending mystery conferences. She’s also been known to jump out of airplanes.

Today L.J. tells us what happens when she just can’t get a character out of her mind.

Lara Leaps Into the Future
by L.J. Sellers

What do you do when a minor character is so much fun you can’t let her go? You plot a novel just for her. That story became The Arranger, a futuristic thriller involving two wildly different concepts: a software technician who devolves into a killer and a national endurance competition called the Gauntlet.

This unusual story developed from several concepts that came together for me: a character I couldn’t get out of my mind, a vivid opening scene I had to use, and a growing concern about the effect of long-term unemployment on our country.

The protagonist is Lara Evans, one of the task force investigators from my Detective Jackson series. In the fifth book, Dying for Justice, Evans had a major role, and I had such a good time developing her character and writing from her perspective that I knew she needed her own novel. After five Jackson titles, I was ready to take a break and stretch my creative side.

One day as I watched paramedics carry someone out of a house, I thought: What if they had witnessed a crime? What if the paramedic became a target? Instantly, I had a premise and an opening scene. Of course, I thought of Lara Evans, who had been a paramedic before she became a cop.

Around the same time, my concern for the economy led me to wonder: Would jobs become commodities that were ripe for exploitation and crime? From there, my antagonist was born, and I knew I had to write a futuristic thriller. But I didn’t want it to be dystopian or supernatural. Like my police procedurals, I wanted it to be gritty and realistic.

Now I had 1.) a protagonist, an ex-detective working as a freelance paramedic; 2.) a setting, a distressed economy 13 years in the future; 3.) a premise and opening scene; and 4.) an antagonist to exploit the situation. All I had to do was find a way to bring it all together.

Lara Evans’ energy and physical fitness led me to create the Gauntlet, an intense contest that also includes an intellectual component and provides jobs as the prize for the winner’s state. So I plotted a story set in a bleak near-future, in which a paramedic witnesses a crime and becomes a target for a killer, then competes in a national contest. Believe me, it was the most challenging outline I’ve ever developed.

Yet writing The Arranger is the most fun I’ve ever had as a novelist, especially the breathless competition scenes. I also became quite attached to my antagonist, and his role in the story developed into a character study. Readers have already asked if this is the first book in a new series, but I don’t know yet. My own future is a little harder to predict.

Catch up with L.J. Sellers here:
http://ljsellers.com
http://ljsellers.com/wordpress
https://www.facebook.com/ljsellers
http://twitter.com/#!/LJSellers

Buy The Arranger on Amazon and Barnes and Noble

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Filed Under: Authors, Characters Tagged With: Character, Detective Jackson, Dying for Justice, L.J. Sellers, mystery, Passions of the Dead, police procedurals, Secrets to Die For, suspense, The Arranger, The Baby Thief, The Sex Club, The Suicide Effect, Thrilled to Death, thrillers

Comments

  1. Stacy Green says

    October 3, 2011 at 10:13 am

    Very interesting and timely post for me. I’m working on a new novel, and the character I thought would be secondary is gaining a strong voice. I definitely have ideas for a future book for him.

    Thanks for sharing!

    • donnagalanti says

      October 3, 2011 at 10:21 am

      Stacy, that’s great! Is this for The Prophet? Great title by the way. Cant wait to read about it. Thanks for stopping by!

  2. ljsellers says

    October 3, 2011 at 12:07 pm

    Thanks for hosting me. Stacy, thanks for stopping in. I’m glad you’re going to make the most of your strong secondary character. Best wishes with your writing.

  3. Kathryn Craft (@kcraftwriter) says

    October 3, 2011 at 12:08 pm

    Hey LJ, welcome to my neck of the woods! I know it’s hard to tell here in cyber-space, but Donna and I live in the same town. What a gift any one of these things can be to an author: a character, an opening, and situation. Another blessing: the insistent whisper of a new voice! I too tend to wait until I have a confluence of a few different aspects to start work. Thanks for the post, Donna!

    • donnagalanti says

      October 3, 2011 at 12:39 pm

      Kathryn, thanks for visiting. I agree..that nagging chatter of a new voice can lead to great new things in writing – like a new novel, even a series.

  4. Terry Shames says

    October 3, 2011 at 1:39 pm

    LJ, I’m thrilled that Lara is prodding you–can’t wait to read more of her world. The Arranger was a great read. More, more!

  5. Randi says

    October 3, 2011 at 2:12 pm

    Love crime thrillers…going to check out some of her other books.

  6. donnagalanti says

    October 3, 2011 at 2:46 pm

    Randi, thanks for reading! Yes, L.J. grabs you with Lara right from the beginning in The Arranger. Read her 1st Chap online at her site here:
    http://ljsellers.com/wordpress/thrillers/the-arranger/the-arranger-excerpt

  7. ljsellers says

    October 3, 2011 at 9:36 pm

    Thanks, Randi, Terry, and Katherine for stopping in. Katherine, it’s funny to think of blog as being located somewhere physically, but it’s great that you have local authors to network with.

    Terry, I know I have to write two more Jackson books first to keep my readers happy, but another “future Lara” story could be in the works after that.

Trackbacks

  1. Top Picks Thursday 11-2-2011 « The Author Chronicles says:
    November 3, 2011 at 1:02 pm

    […] about the key components of an effective character arc, while L.J. Sellers explores what happens when a character won’t let go. And The Bookshelf Muse’s wonderful Character Thesaurus brings us the entry for the character […]

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