Kill them Aaaaalll!!!!

It is almost Halloween...

You know what this means...

Scary costumes, monsters in the night...

And yet closer to NaNoWriMo...

So this blog is dedicated to -

Muhhhhrrder.

Yes, sometimes, you gotta kill somebody off.

Me, personally, I love to kill of characters. Usually, I off my exhusband or who ever cut me in traffic. Writing is cheaper than therapy and if you do it right, it pays you instead of vice versa.

However some have a hard time doing it 'just right' so I am offering up some tips and tricks.

I did a blog on Coffee Time Romance on Thirteen Ways To Poison someone in a book (see the whole blog here)... Some of the better ones were:

Smoking is gonna kill you~ Five cigarettes or half a cigar (according to wikepedia) contain enough nicotine to kill off your character… if ingested. If they smoke them, it may take a bit longer.

Pseudo-nitzschia- Say what? It is a shellfish, tiny bugger, which, if eaten, causes things like permanent short-term memory loss, brain damage, and death in severe cases. Careful what sea water your victim ingests…

But you don't have to poison them. There are tons of ways to off a character. Usually, the more creative you are, the more interesting your reader will find it.

Stories set in Florida almost beg you to include a croc or an alligator. Just like in the frozen north, freezing is a great way to ensure they don't come creeping back in the next chapter.

Not all characters you kill will be bad guys. I remember that I had a very hard time killing off a character in the Odd Series. But I knew that if my main character lost someone close to her, it would spur her to go on a rampage against the bad guy. So he had to go...

It's Halloween. Pull out a glass of apple cider and put on your witch hat. Remember, the really fun thing about being a writer is...

You get to write. Have fun with it!!

Oh and the handsome guy in the pic? That is my youngest. The suit jacket probably threw ya as to what he was for Halloween last year but he is Dr. Who... Monster version. Yeah. My kids are weird. I love it.