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Murder for Hire and other Delightful Dalliances

08/14/2008
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You know what’s great about being a novelist, screenplay maven and a writer? A novelist, screenwriter, writer gets to kill people and get paid for it and no one cares, cops even laugh about the whole thing.

Murder for hire is alive and well on my computer every day.

That’s right.

You see, I write novels, teleplays and screenplays, when I am not creating the masterpieces you wonderful TheBAYNET.com readers get to peruse each and every day. Sometimes I write my own novels, and other times I am paid to write novels for others.

I’m a ghost writer, you see, and people that have stories to tell sometimes find me and ask me to write their story. Sometimes it is because they have tried and the words just come out all wrong and other times they just can’t stand the amount of work it takes and the discipline required to actually write a novel.

For the uneducated, forcing yourself to sit in front of a computer on a beautiful spring day to write a chapter in a book that may never be read by another human being is tough stuff. There is always something, anything else, to do on any given day.

Because I work here most of the time, I write my novels on the weekends – weekends when I do not have to cover all the car wrecks, Southern Maryland murders, bank robberies and such on my cover weekends.

If that book is a ghost work for hire, frequently I have a deadline, so I have learned to crank out a ton of words in a short time.

Anyways, back to the point. The greatest thing of all about being a novelist is that I get to create characters and then if they tick me off, or if I get tired of them, I murder them. Sometimes I do it slow and painfully, others fast but bloody and brutal – my favorite.

What people don’t understand is that novelists create characters from their experiences in the world. Therefore, when I create a character, it is someone I have met, or have known that used for the characterization. Then, if in real life that person ticks me off, I can eviscerate them in the book and they don’t even know I have killed, maimed, mutilated, and/or mangled.

Of course, I have characters I have created in books where that character angers me during the story, or for whom I just get tired of writing dialogue. Then I find a way to work their demise into the story.

In my last novel, I created a cop that I made insane, a woman that tried to murder her children and was in turn killed by a retired theme park security chief, only to have him get murdered by the insane cop. Great stuff: lots of blood, lots of bullets, lots of amazing scenes of turmoil and pain.

I caused it all and then took a cop to lunch and laughed about my murders, it’s great to be a writer!

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