I did it. I signed up for the April A-Z blogging challenge. I've been remiss about blogging to say the least, and I figure this high-octane push into the blogosphere will help me develop some better blogging habits or make me question my sanity. Maybe both. 
The challenge is simple. There are 30 days in April. If you take out Sundays, that leaves 26. There are 26 letters in the alphabet. For the challenge, each of the days, excluding Sunday, is assigned a letter. On each day you are to write a blog post whose theme has something to do with something starting with that letter.  
For ten years, bloggers have been taking on the challenge. A few years ago, I joined in by posting a poem each day of April (which also happens to be National Poetry Month). This time around, in hopes of keeping with the books and writing theme of my blog, I'll be posting book excerpts from my novels and stories. I hope you'll stop by now and again during the month.  I'm going to need all the support I can get  to meet the challenge!   

This months IWSG question, whether I'd rather write heroes or villains, raised some interesting thoughts in my writerly head. 
My first response was neither. I tend to like books where the hard and fast lines between good and bad are blurred.  Those are the kind of stories I strive to write. But that answer is a little disingenuous. Of course, stories need good and bad. Of course, the two play against each other.  That's how a good story is created.  And I've written my share of heroes and villains,  The worst of them held a knife to my heroine's throat. The best of them saved a man from being buried in an avalanche, risking her own life to do it.  Certainly, these fit the good/bad pattern of behavior. 
The best characters I've created, though, carry both good and bad to some degree. And I think the secret  (which isn't really a secret) to writing any character is to make sure they aren't cardboard cutouts, that they are characters not caricatures.  The best are like the people you and I know, folks who sometimes make bad decisions even though they are good people. Or do good even if they would never consider themselves heroic. Kind of like us, only more so--with a bigger push towards good or evil.
I'm thinking, now, of a character in my novel The Tender Bonds. Jack is the estranged father of the protagonist, Patty.   The story is about her reconnecting with him and with her family roots. But Jack isn't the wonderful man she remembers from early childhood. He's in prison for vehicular manslaughter--driving drunk he killed a woman and three children.  He's not done well by his daughter, making little attempt to stay in her life. And yet.  He isn't a monster.  He, in fact, loves his daughter.  How do you reconcile the two?   In the end, I figured out that it wasn't Jack's "badness" that made him so flawed, it was his weakness. He's an alcoholic who could not or would not deal with his drinking problem. He's a father who feels that he can't raise his daughter and feels she'd be better off without him. He's a husband who could not keep his marriage together. And he's a  man who's carelessness  causes a ton of collateral damage--including a daughter who feels she isn't worthy of love.  I like Jack as a character. I like the complexity I was able to create with him. It's more difficult, I think, to try and make characters that are complex, that mix good with evil to varying degrees. But it is also more rewarding.

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