Peter’s Comments (group member since Nov 29, 2012)

Peter’s comments from the Ask Peter Levine group.

Thanks for these great questions!

As for Tom’s mother, my plan wasn’t so much not to give her a story of her own, as it was that I ended up writing two stories, at very different times, that focus on Tom’s relationship with his father.

While you often hear about overprotective or overbearing mothers who are aren’t happy with their son’s love interests, I wanted to examine a father’s point of view.

In those stories, I tried to convey a sense of infatuation, even obsession, that Stuart has with his elusive son, who always seems at a distance from him.

Therefore, everything else, including his wife (who, as you point out, never even gets named), gets drowned out in his effort to get a read on Tom.

Tom’s demise came about by accident, so to speak. I’d written the final story earlier than many of the others, when I was still playing with the idea of a popular but fated hero. So, killing him off didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, though later on it did!

But again, the idea was that for as popular as Tom was, he wasn’t long for the world, and obviously, the final story describes that.

Thanks so much!