Thomas George Phillips asked Jeffrey Round:

Why is Dan Sharpe so unlucky in romance?

Jeffrey Round Plot convenience is this author's simple answer. I want the reader to feel compelled to go along on Dan's ride, and to feel his pain and confusion, both personal and professional. What makes any story work is when a character strives for a goal, sometimes achieving but also sometimes failing to achieve it, and the tension that builds as a result. The reader needs to want to discover if the character succeeds in order to go on the journey with him or her.

The longer answer is much more complicated. Dan is a complex character, even while he thinks he isn't that hard to understand. This makes him hard to live with. He demands almost as much of those around him as he does of himself, and sometimes those demands are too great. This stems in part from his lack of self worth. The reason for this lies at the heart of Dan's upbringing, which was difficult and at times brutal. He lost his mother when he was four; his father was a physically abusive man. As a result, Dan spends much of his time trying to make sense of his fraught relationship to both parents. Much more of that comes out in the next book, Lion's Head Revisited, to be published in February 2020. Beyond all that, of course, is Dan's rage. To his surprise he discovers in book 3, The Jade Butterfly, that he has PTSD. Many things trigger Dan's anger, but particularly what he sees as unfairness, whether to himself or to others. It is what drives him to find the missing people he searches for, but the underlying rage often plays against him in his relationships as he simply demands too much of others. In the later books, he may have met his match when he begins dating a police officer, but I won't reveal more here.

Thanks for the great question, Thomas.

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