Sue Barnard discusses what makes authors want to write new stories on existing characters.#giveaway #author #guestpost #alternate #history #romeoandjuliet .@AuthorSusanB .@rararesources

NEW LIFE FOR OLD CHARACTERS

a guest post by

Sue Barnard

Sebastian Faulks, Charlie Higson and Anthony Horowitz have all done it for James Bond. Alexandra Ripley did it for Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Jill Paton Walsh did it for Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. There have been numerous attempts to solve Charles Dickens’ unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood.  Even Thomas the Tank Engine has been given a new lease of life, by the son of his original creator. 

So what is it that makes authors want to write new stories centred on existing characters?

In one respect, I think, it’s because once the original author has died, there can be a great sense of regret that there will be no more from the same pen. So if the authors’ stories and characters are popular, why not give their fans more to enjoy, in the form of sequels, prequels, or simply more adventures?

You don’t need to be a famous, or even a published author to take advantage of this very useful literary device. Using a well-loved character (or set of characters) as the basis for a new story can be an excellent way of dealing with an attack of writer’s block. Think of a favourite character from a book, a play, or even a poem. Imagine what it might be like to meet that character face to face. What would you say to them? How do you think they would respond? Try writing a short dialogue between the two of you, and see where it leads. You may well find that it gives you a springboard to a whole new story. No writing is ever wasted, even if it doesn’t end up in the final version.

Or think about how the character behaves in the original work. If his or her behaviour is unusual, what might have happened in the past to affect their actions in the present? Let your imagination run riot – prequels make fascinating stories!  My current WIP is a companion story to my second novel, Nice Girls Don’t, and explores the background to one of the characters who barely steps out of the shadows in the original story.

Or you can even give the original story an alternative ending – as I did with my debut novel The Ghostly Father. It is a sort of part-prequel, part-sequel to the original Romeo & Juliet tale, and explores what might have happened to Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers if events had taken a different course. In the play, a sequence of misfortunes leads to a maddeningly preventable double-suicide. But what if just one of those unfortunate events had not occurred? What difference could this have made to the eventual outcome?

Read the book and find out…

Introducing...

The Ghostly Father

by

Sue Barnard

Was this what really happened to Romeo and Juliet?

Think you know the world’s most famous love story?  Think again. 

What if the story of Romeo and Juliet really happened – but not quite in the way we’ve all been told?

Kindle (universal link) | Paperback 

This part-prequel, part-sequel to the original tale, told from the point of view of the Friar, tells how an ancient Italian manuscript reveals secrets and lies which have remained hidden for hundreds of years, and casts new doubts on the official story of Shakespeare’s famous star-crossed lovers.

If you love the Romeo and Juliet story but are disappointed with the way it ended, this is the book for you.

~

Sue Barnard is a British novelist, editor and award-winning poet.  She was born in North Wales some time during the last millennium, but has spent most of her life in and around Manchester.  After graduating from Durham University she had a variety of office jobs before becoming a full-time parent.  If she had her way, the phrase “Non-Working Mother” would be banned from the English language.

Her mind is so warped that she has appeared on BBC TV’s Only Connect quiz show, and she has also compiled questions for BBC Radio 4's fiendishly difficult Round Britain Quiz. This once caused one of her sons to describe her as "professionally weird." The label has stuck.

Sue speaks French like a Belgian, German like a schoolgirl, and Italian and Portuguese like an Englishwoman abroad.  She is also very interested in family history.  Her own background is far stranger than any work of fiction; she would write a book about it if she thought anybody would believe her.

Sue now lives in Cheshire, UK, with her extremely patient husband and a large collection of unfinished scribblings. 

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Do you like an #alternated #history book? Check out this jailhouse 'interview' with Clyde (Bonnie 'n' Clyde) @cowboyvamp

A jailhouse interview with Clyde Barrow

from a book called

Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road

by

Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall

Interview recorded by Royce Jenkins, a reporter for the Texas Lubbock Dispatch

My name is Clyde Barrow and I am a thief, a murderer and a product of wealth inequality. 

You may know me from the shenanigans I got caught up in with the love of my life, Bonnie Parker. Most folks think Bonnie and Clyde got cut down in a hail of bullets outside of Sailes, Louisiana in 1934, and most folks figured we got what was coming to us — neither is exactly true. 

I ain’t proud of the things we done, but I’m not exactly ashamed either. I wish no one had died, that’s for certain, but when the system is stacked against you from the get go, things are going to turn out bad. I always say, you kick a dog long enough, one day, you’re gonna get bit.

In my day, it was the Great Depression that lit the fuse. Right before that was what they called the Gilded Age, with the Robber Barons — the captains of industry — rigging all the laws, so them and their pals could carve off bigger and bigger slices of the pie until the whole thing came crashing down like an outhouse in a tornado. 

You think it was the rich that suffered? If you know your history, you know that ain’t true. It was the poor folks who live hand-to-mouth who paid the price. Me and my family, our neighbors, we was the ones standing in soup lines and living under bridges, with no jobs and no hope. 

As a result of that, I grew up dirt poor in Cement City, a little hellhole outside of Dallas, Texas. There wasn’t but two ways to make it out of Cement City: dead or in prison.

I tried to play it square, tried to get a job, but there wasn’t no jobs to be had and what there was didn’t pay enough scratch to get by. Sound familiar?

Rooting around in the dirt for a dying wage, like a hog under an acorn tree, well that wasn’t for me. No sir. I figured if the fat cats could take what they wanted, I could too. Only problem was, when some no-account like me steals a broken-down car or a truck full of turkeys, well them old boys running America, well, they just couldn’t have that. 

Right away I ended up in jail — and they made me work for free inside prison. The bosses, them at owned the prisons, actually profited by keeping me locked up. The prisons today are full of young men and women who try to get by selling weed, but they sure ain’t overcrowded with the Wall Street sharks that caused the latest Great Recession and stole hundreds of millions in the process. 

Ain’t we learned nothing from history? Can’t hardly believe were running through the same thing today. The robber barons damn near ruined this country, and they’re about to do it again.

Me and Bonnie helped out in 1934 by keeping old FDR safe from an assassin so he could put in the New Deal, giving the working man a voice with unions, regulating Wall Street and so on. But money has its own gravity, and now the super-rich are pulling the government levers behind the scenes to make it even harder for the working class, even though they tell us to our faces that they ain’t.

In this day and age, wealth inequality is even worse than at the height of the robber barons in the 1930s. Right now, in America, the top ten percent of the country controls damn near 80 percent of the wealth. And it gets worse the richer they are. What do they need all that money for?

They’re spending billions trying to convince us about some trickle-down nonsense. Saying if they get taxed less and if they don’t have no regulations and if the government doesn’t invest in public programs it will all be magically better for the working man! That’s a load of manure. It wasn’t true in 1929 and it sure as hell ain’t true now. That’s like saying the working class might get a few more scraps falling from the rich folks’ dinner table if they just pile up even more mountains of food on their fancy plates. It’s all a damn lie.

Got to be blind to not see that we’re speeding head first into something even worse than the Great Depression. Don’t know why rich people can’t just do the right thing. Recognize that profits are for everyone working to make them, not just to be hoarded by the ones lucky enough to own the capital. There’s more than enough money to go around, still leaving plenty for the rich to have their yachts and jets.

I ain’t suggesting people pick up guns and start robbing and running, like me and Bonnie. That won’t get you nowhere but in jail or dead in a ditch. But I am suggesting folks wise up to the real criminals who keep bleeding the working class, squeezing the disenfranchised and lining their pockets, all from the tops of their gilded towers. 

Me and Bonnie may have been murderers and thieves, but we knew what we were doing was wrong. I ain’t so sure about this new crop of Robber Barons. That scares me more than looking down the barrel of a Tommy gun. 

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Introducing...
Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road

In an alternate timeline, legendary lovers Bonnie and Clyde are given one last shot at redemption. Thrust into a Depression-era fight against greed they didn’t ask for, but now must win in order to save themselves and their families, will the notorious duo overcome their criminal pasts and put their “skills” to use fighting for justice for the working class?

Amazon

The story begins in 1984 when reporter Royce Jenkins gets a tip to meet an old woman at a Texas cemetery. Cradling an antique rifle and standing over a freshly dug grave, the old woman claims to be Bonnie Parker. Turns out, she says, it wasn’t Bonnie and Clyde who were ambushed fifty years earlier. Instead, the outlaws were kidnapped, forced into a covert life and given a deadly mission—save President Roosevelt from an assassination plot financed by wealthy industrialists determined to sink the New Deal.

Cutting back and forth between the modern era where the shocked reporter investigates the potential scoop-of-the-century, and the desperate undercover exploits of Bonnie and Clyde in 1934, Resurrection Road is a page-turning sleep-wrecker.

Bonnie and Clyde. Saving American democracy, one bank robbery at a time. 

A character interview with Karen Brown from Alison Morton's novel

INCEPTIO

Alison Morton

New York, present day. Karen Brown, angry and frightened after surviving a kidnap attempt, has a harsh choice - being eliminated by government enforcer Jeffery Renschman or fleeing to the mysterious Roma Nova, her dead mother's homeland in Europe.Founded sixteen centuries ago by Roman exiles and ruled by women, Roma Nova gives Karen safety and a ready-made family. But a shocking discovery about her new lover, the fascinating but arrogant special forces officer Conrad Tellus who rescued her in America, isolates her.

Amazon.UK

Amazon.com

Renschman reaches into her new home and nearly kills her. Recovering, she is desperate to find out why he is hunting her so viciously. Unable to rely on anybody else, she undergoes intensive training, develops fighting skills and becomes an undercover cop. But crazy with bitterness at his past failures, Renschman sets a trap for her, knowing she has no choice but to spring it...

A character interview with Karen Brown from Alison Morton's novel INCEPTIO:

Who are you? Tell us about your background. What makes you you?
First interview with subject. Note on record: She is still in the Eastern United States.
Me? Karen Brown? I’m nothing special, just a normal twenty something, living in New York in the EUS. That’s the Eastern United States, north of Louisiane and south of Québec for those of you who are foreigners. My Mom, who was from Roma Nova in Europe, drove herself off a cliff when I was three and my Dad – I loved my Dad so much – he went when I was twelve. I cried when my cousins made me leave my beautiful New Hampshire home and live with them in the Mid-West. I ran away to the city the day after I graduated high school. I have a boring job, but love my weekends of fresh air in Central Kew Park where I volunteer. But last week, I had to give a presentation for a new foreign client. When I shook hands with his interpreter, who didn’t seem like any interpreter I’d ever met, my world shifted and not only because he was pretty hot.

So what are your likes or dislikes? What do you think of the interpreter you met recently?
I’m pretty easy going, I don’t like or dislike anything in particular. No, that’s not right – people being unfair or unkind bugs me. Why do they do that?
I jog, drink coffee, laugh with the kids in the park at weekends, but I often feel I’m in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. That interpreter turned out to be a spy and incredibly arrogant, which really irritates me. I was pleased when he said he was going back to Roma Nova. Okay, I wasn’t 100% pleased…

What is your main goal in life?
Who knows? I have a vague thought I’d like to do more than be a junior ad exec but at present, I have a safe job and one or two friends.

How do you see yourself?
Hey, are we going psych here? You sound like the student counselor at high school and she was lousy.

How do other people see you?
You think I go around asking them that? I don’t think so.

One year later . . . (Note: Subject is now generally adjusted culturally to Roma Nova)