May 19th a year ago, Game of Thrones came to an end, and with the season it went out with, it was generally a sigh of relief.
A Song of Ice and Fire inspired me to write and my novel style writing is derived from that POV-hopping. I immediately loved the intensity and the feeling that no one is safe. I took the latter especially to heart, and in my earlier stories I killed off characters left and right. But then I realized something: what made the books special wasn’t the extreme amount of death, but rather that a lot of them truly meant something, whereas I was killing people left and right cause I damn well could.
When you read my writing, I hope when I kill characters, it genuinely means something to you.
May 19th three years ago I woke up to the news Chris Cornell was dead. I love both Soundgarden and Audioslave, and spent the next week listening to The Singles soundtrack (the deluxe edition no less). I followed this by writing handwriting a short story of a fight sequence that was set to “Black Hole Sun,” which had a lot of the aforementioned meaningless death. In hindsight, that may have been a little insensitive given the situation.
-JR
The Twilight Sloan 