Today I have the pleasure of blogging to introduce my Science Fiction Romance, STARJACKED, which is new in print, and as blogging always makes me introspective, I got thinking about the nature of writing and reading.
Like most writers, I started out as a reader. I confess to having read thousands of books in my life. Each one has immersed me in a new and fantastic world, not unlike the characters in the movie Avatar, where men and women actually control alien bodies made using their own DNA.
When I am in a book, though my eyes are seeing text, my brain is seeing the scenery confronting the protagonists of the book and my heart is experiencing the emotions.
Writing is the same for me. Though I am not a tall gorgeous blonde like the heroine of STARJACKED, Tia, when I write from her point of view, I am her. Yes, I am a kick-ass space pirate with a deadly secret. I even do some gender-bending, because I am equally inside Rork, the hero, who is an uncercover agent of the Union of planets. His mission is to bring Tia and her comrades to justice, and he find himself a Tia’s slave.
I enter each of my point of view characters, even the villians. I may not sympathize with his or her aims, but I do see through their eyes. Jeb, one of the antagonists from STARJACKED is not a likeable fellow. He’s clear about what he wants (power) and has no problem with what he must do to seize it (murder), but he is my avatar during the scenes from his poiint of view.
I love thinking of the perfect word, paring away unnessary words to get to the most expressive sentence, but that’s not my I write. I write to escape.
I write to enter other worlds and other lives. Each character is my avatar and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
How about you? Do you enter the characters of the books you read?
Do you have a character or person you wish were your avatar in life, or whose world you’d like to explore?
Happy reading!
Karin Shah
Click the following link for a free short story, as well as more about me and STARJACKED. link
