Greetings. Well I have completed another giveaway and I hope it proves to be good advertising. I think what my book needs is better advertising. Then maybe it would find its audience. The few people that have read it tend to give it reasonable ratings, so presumably they liked it at least to a degree. There is of course a two star rating, but I wouldn’t expect everybody to like anything. After all everybody is an individual with unique tastes and what one person likes another person may hate.

That’s of course just fine. It also does bring up a rather strange trope, where you find in the book or a movie a statement that a character is not like others. It’s usually followed by a passage that makes them sound perfectly ordinary. But since every one is an individual, nobody is like everybody else and as such it’s very strange to state that a character is not like other people. In fact characters are more relatable if they are similar to people you’d meet. They may have unique skills and abilities, but they’re more relatable if they seem similar to the average.

I tend to think of my characters as being rather average, but placed in unusual circumstances. Even if they look different, I try to make them somewhat ordinary. Even my most nonhuman characters have attitudes that are similar to most other characters. In fact my main character in Trapped in a Curse I consider to be a perfectly ordinary teenage girl. Yes she is a little taller than average, but other than that she’s relatively average.

If a character should be unusual in a certain way, I’d much prefer that I was shown the differences rather than being told that they were not like other characters. One particular movie, The Replacements, is constantly telling me that the coach is not like other coaches, but it seems to me that what they’re saying is he’s completely average. Like all coaches he wants to win and since he has what may be a rather poor team, he’s pushing the envelope. I don’t think there’s anything unusual about that.

Finally, if you’re interested in my writing I have a website where I run another blog. In that blog I’ve been publishing, relatively unedited, excerpts from a book I haven’t published yet. It’s called Stretching Their Wings, A Meadow and Lark Adventure. There’s also a page labeled Meadow and Lark where you can read the prologue in the first few chapters. I don’t see that there’s many people reading, but there is no charge for reading through it and if you’re interested in my writing, it’s at least an example. There’s a link in my good reads profile to my website if you’re interested in reading it.