Don’t kill me!

Fiction authors often kill their characters. In mysteries and crime stories, there are victims. In thrillers, good guys and bad die. In sci-fi, there’s also violence and death. So I performed an auto-survey and asked myself which characters did I want to keep alive and which ones did I reluctantly kill.

I considered both protagonists and antagonists (villains) and came up with a list. While I won’t divulge that list (too many spoilers), let me explain why it hurts, even for the villains: if a...