The most compelling characters are those who want something desperately and who will do anything to get it, which is why Scarlett O’Hara is such a perennially popular character. Frankly, I find her a bit over the top -- selfish and greedy and way too egocentric. I can’t write such characters, at least not at the beginning of a novel. I prefer quiet, unassuming characters who are forced into action by circumstances. (To me, life is the real villain. It does things to us that no make-believe villain can even begin to imagine.) Still, my characters do want.
BOB STARK, the point-of-view character of my novel
More Deaths Than One, wants serenity, though what he gets are nightmares, both the sleeping and the waking kind. Debilitated by headaches, he doesn’t have the energy to discover the truth, but Kerry, a young woman he meets in a coffee shop, goads him into it. (I know their meeting is trite, but where would you meet people if you just returned home after eighteen years in Southeast Asia?) When Kerry is threatened, though, he becomes what he needs to be to keep her safe.
My other novel,
A Spark of Heavenly Fire, has four point-of-view characters, all of whom want something.
All KATE CUMMINGS wants is a good night’s sleep.
Her husband, a semi-invalid, committed suicide thirteen months ago. Many times during the years of his illness she could have treated him a little better than she did, and she is haunted by her own mean spirit.
Then the red death descends on Colorado, the entire state is quarantined, and martial law is declared. As a patient’s advocate and an insomniac, forty-two-year-old Kate sees more than her share of the horror. People with bright red eyes spewing blood, then falling down--dead. Tanks and trigger-happy troops patrolling the streets. Men in biohazard suits throwing bodies into the back of delivery vans.
Now she wants not to be afraid.
All JEREMY KING wants is to leave Colorado.
He has everything. Two Oscars. A vast Montana ranch. Wife, son, daughter. He also looks better now, at fifty-eight, than he did when he was young.
Having grown up poor in Grand Junction, he hates Colorado, and only came to Denver to finish a film. As soon as the director yells cut, he’s in his rented Lexus on his way to the private airfield where his jet is supposed to be ready for take-off. It isn’t. Instead, armed National Guardsmen inform him that airspace is restricted. Furious that he’s being treated like one of the peasants, he decides to drive home, but the mountain highway is clogged with a thousand cars going nowhere. He returns to Denver, determined to leave Colorado if it’s the last thing he ever does.
All GREG PULLMAN wants is to know the truth.
Since childhood he’s been consumed with the need to know why creatures act the way they do. It is no different with the red death.
After discovering that the disease is a bio-engineered organism, he tries to find out who would develop such a thing, and why. He learns that despite the ban on bio-warfare experimentation, all over the world deadly organisms are being produced and stockpiled. Bubonic plague. West Nile fever. Green monkey virus. Combinations such as smallpox with Ebola and encephalitis.
Burdened by the awful truth, he turns to his friend Kate for comfort, and finds himself wanting her, though he is engaged to Pippi O’Brien.
All PIPPI O’BRIEN wants is . . . well, she doesn’t know what she wants.
After college, she wanted a job at a New York television station, but accepted a position as weathergirl in Denver. Now, at thirty, she wants to marry handsome Greg Pullman, but when he takes the hint and proposes, she says she’ll think about it. A few days later, deciding she does love him after all, she says yes. While waiting in a bar for him that very evening, she meets Jeremy King. Feeling the full force of his personality, she leaves with him, forgetting about Greg. Now she has a new dream: lovely consort to the charismatic King.
She is signing autographs with Jeremy on a downtown street when UN soldiers arrive, level their weapons at the assembled fans, and order everyone to drop to the ground. Fighting back the urge to scream, she obeys. Those who don’t obey are immediately gunned down.
Now all she wants is to accompany Jeremy on his quest to escape from Colorado.
So, that’s what the characters of
More Deaths Than One and
A Spark of Heavenly Fire want. What do your characters want? What do they get? And in the end, do they get what they want, or do they get what they need?
Light Bringer: Thirty-seven years after being abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Colorado, Becka Johnson has returned to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? Why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen? Who is Philip, and why does her body sing in harmony with his? And what do either of them have to do with a shadow corporation that once operated a secret underground installation in the area?
Daughter Am I: When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents — grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born — she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead. She meets and falls in love Tim Olson, whose grandfather shared a deadly secret with her great-grandfather. Now Mary and Tim need to stay one step ahead of the killer who is desperate to dig up that secret.
More Deaths Than One: Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in Southeast Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. He attends her new funeral and sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on? And why are two men who appear to be government agents hunting for him? With the help of Kerry Casillas, a baffling young woman Bob meets in a coffee shop, he uncovers the unimaginable truth.
A Spark of Heavenly Fire: In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable disease called the red death, insomniac Kate Cummings struggles to find the courage to live and to love. Investigative reporter Greg Pullman, is determined to discover who unleashed the deadly organism and why they did it, until the cost — Kate’s life — becomes more than he can pay.
I have no doubts of the success of Second Wind. The publisher, Mike Simpson has the uncanny ability of getting his authors involved in the business, challenging us to expand our abilities beyond the scope of writing. He’s gotten die-hard thriller writers to edit romances. He’s gotten shy authors to do book signings. And somehow (still don’t know how) he’s gotten me to become Second Wind’s promotion co-ordinator. Okay, I do know how. He genuinely likes the books he publishes, and says the most wonderful things about them. In an introduction to my 100-word stories that were included in the romance anthology, Love is on the Wind, Mike wrote: “Pat Bertram, author of the newly released duo of suspense novels, More Deaths Than One and A Spark of Heavenly Fire, is a writer who defies categories, a literary maverick whose stories transcend genre and transport readers to beguiling worlds filled with compelling characters.”