Listening to the Voices of our Characters, A Guest Post by Rachel McClellan

Okay, so today we're getting the extra-special insight on characters from FRACTURED LIGHT author Rachel McClellan. But before that, I have the winners of the SURRENDER ARCs! Thank you so much to everyone who tweeted, liked my books/stories on Amazon, and/or pre-ordered REGRET.

The two winners of the ARCs are:
Shari Green
Kearston Dawn Preece

Congrats! Emails have been sent.

Okay, so let's start with a bit about Rachel's book, and then hear what she has to say about listening to the voices of our characters.

About FRACTURED LIGHT: I’m dying, I thought. This was unexpected and not at all how I envisioned my death. I was supposed to die gardening in a flowerbed as a hundred-year-old woman, not as a seventeen-year-old trapped in a lake beneath inches of ice.

Llona Reese is used to living on the run. After a Vyken killed her parents, she knew they would eventually come for her too. She can’t take any chances. But when she starts to make friends for the first time in her life, she gets careless and lets her guard down. Big mistake.

As an Aura, Llona can manipulate light and harness its energy. But if she wants to survive, Llona will have to defy the Auran Council and learn to use her power as a weapon against the Vyken whose sole desire is to take her light. Now she’s caught in something bigger than she can understand, with a power she can’t wield, and no one she can trust, except, just maybe, a mysterious stranger.

Listening to the Voices of our Characters:

There are a select few who claim to see dead people. I’m not one of them, but I do see characters, and, honestly, some of them are just as scary. The other day I reached for a hanger that had slid partially beneath an attic door in the back of my son’s closet. Just as my fingers touched the hard, white plastic, something, or someone, sucked the hanger into the attic. It was only a moment later that I realized the thing in my attic is the ghost of a seriously pissed-off, murdered woman.

None of this happened, of course. It was only in my imagination, but now the woman is there. Stuck inside my head as much as she’s stuck in my attic. She joins the countless others who are just waiting for their story to be told. I listen best I can, and when I have time I write down their stories. The sooner the better.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when I could look at an oddly-shaped tree and keep walking; the deep hole in its side was merely a squirrel’s home and not an entrance to a world where humans hide at night and travel at day to avoid the growing number of Junks (those who have had their humanity turned off by the Authorities).

At first I tried ignoring the characters, pretended they didn’t exist. But this only made them louder. When their cries started to contend with that of my children’s, I knew I had to listen. It took some time, but eventually I found a way to balance my own life with that of theirs.

Llona wasn’t the first character I wrote about, but she was the loudest, and, gratefully, wasn’t as scary as the others. I like writing about her. She makes me laugh so I’m glad she has more to say in the sequel of Fractured Light.

Those of you interested in writing, listen to characters. They’re all around us desperately waiting to be heard. Help them find their voice. Work hard. Stay focused. And most importantly don’t give up on them. They only want to exist.

----------

Wow, great advice! Where to follow Rachel:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Blog
• Website

So, how do you find your characters? Let me know in the comments and one lucky winner will receive a signed copy of FRACTURED LIGHT by Rachel McClellan!