After publishing The Pipes Are Calling, I found myself exploring and struggling through a genre quite unlike any I've ever tried before: superheroes. They're a revered, albeit fictitious, people group.
The specific vigilante I chose has been a personal favorite of mine for a few years now and honestly the only one I'm acquainted with. But becoming intimately involved in progressing his story really surfaced the question every author, artist, producer and poet should ask themselves: Who am I making a hero?

It's a vital question in today's culture, all too often ignored in the arts. Audiences look up to the people on the screen and the names on a page. We, their creators, have a tremendous and inevitable responsibility with how we handle that. Movie producers in the 1930s, who started creating films about gangsters, were careful to destroy their subject's honor along with their life because they didn't want susceptible audiences patterning themselves after them. They knew the weight of the consequences, ones that are now frequently realized as artists of all kinds have swept this reality under the carpet. We help create the world we live in, unique from any other profession. Many have and will unavoidably esteem what we have written.
So, before you put that pen to paper, finger to keyboard, or voice to recorder, ask yourself: Who will be the hero?