Ask the Author: Kimberly Burton Allen
Answered Questions (5)
Kimberly Burton Allen
My great-grandfather, described by my grandmother as a "fancy man" (drinker, gambler, maybe peripherally involved in politics) failed to return home one winter night around 1906. My great-grandmother, who spoke only Norwegian, sent my five-year-old grandmother and her six-year-old brother into town on the buckboard, where they went from bar to bar asking if anyone knew where he was. He disappeared that night and was never heard from again. Had he fallen drunk into a snowbank and froze to death? Had he been mugged or killed, perhaps over gambling winnings? Had he run off with another woman? My great-grandmother, perhaps suspecting the truth, treated him as dead and refused to speak of him again. My grandmother lived to be 107 and never knew the answer to the mystery. Then, about 3 years ago, a cousin of mine researching his ancestry, came upon a cross reference to an unrelated name with the same DNA markers, discovered the answer: He had been a serial adulterer who had gotten a young girl pregnant, and the girl's father had quite literally threatened to shoot him if he didn't marry her. So they left town, married, and raised a whole other family elsewhere, which only intersected when the DNA matched the two families.
Kimberly Burton Allen
Write around it. Use my writing time to either flesh out another scene, add backstory about my main characters to their dossiers (not necessarily to go into the manuscript, but perhaps to flavor their motives). If I'm still blocked, I go back through previously written sections and edit and rewrite.
Kimberly Burton Allen
Easy--I'd go to Hogwarts School of Wizardry! I have re-read the series several times and so love the world J.K. Rowling created!
Kimberly Burton Allen
A Burnable Book, by Bruce Holsinger...Swimming Lesson, by Jaire Fuller...the One Man, by Andrew Gross...The Orphan's Tale, by Pam Jenoff...and Short Stories from Hogwarts, by JK Rowling (because I can never get enough of Hogwarts!!)
Kimberly Burton Allen
Publishing my second suspense novel, NET STALKER, in paperback. (It's already available on Kindle.) In doing so, I'm rereading it word by word (nay, character by character, in order to circumvent those occasional punctuation blips). It's funny, because like many authors, I don't reread my published work -- sure that I'll find a phrase I could have changed, or a better verb...in short, the perfectionist's hell. A book, like a teenager, needs to be able to fly on its own, without my ongoing interference.
But the flip side, as I am finding as I double check everything in NET STALKER is that...I have missed these characters. I am once more drawn into their world...that world I created for them...and I find myself involved in the story all over again.
But the flip side, as I am finding as I double check everything in NET STALKER is that...I have missed these characters. I am once more drawn into their world...that world I created for them...and I find myself involved in the story all over again.
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