LILITH: A character study of Lisa Singleton

An aircraft carrier is like a floating city—when fully loaded for battle, it can carry over 6,000 people, and with a story setting like that, it’s easy for characters to get lost in the shuffle. That’s why they have to have strong personalities.

Enter Lisa Singleton—wife, police officer, mother to be, and as strong-willed and tough as they come.

In my latest thriller, LILITH, I wanted to bring back two favorite characters from my first novel, Hunter and Lisa. Though they had some marital issues, and in fact were on the verge of divorce because of the emotional stress from Lisa’s miscarriage, they patched things up and are now ready to face the world together.

  

I thought it would be unique to have two main characters who kind of share the spotlight, instead of one guy or one woman. I always liked the couple in the Mummy movie franchise, the O’Donnells, because when one got in trouble, the other one would bail them out. Same principal here.

Lisa, like her husband, is bi-racial—African-American and Chinese. She is short and has frizzy, black hair, which Hunter finds very sexy. She has dark, Asian eyes and pouty lips and likes to work out, so she is muscular, but also very feminine.

Her father is a Chinese immigrant who came to America and became a police officer. He married the daughter of the chief of police, which was frowned on at first by family members on both sides, but was eventually accepted. Lisa was raised in the small town in North Carolina where she met Hunter.

After high school, Lisa’s love of animals and nature coupled with the admiration she had for her father, led her to become a park ranger. She covers the several-thousand-acre Dismal Swamp State Park on the North Carolina side of the border, just miles from where she was raised in River City.

Not only is Lisa a trained law-enforcement officer, she is a third-degree black belt in a type of Kung Fu known as Wing Chun. She also taught Hunter, who managed to earn his own black belt.

Something else Lisa learned as a park ranger was photography. She loves photographing the wild flowers and trees that grow throughout the park, as well as the bears, wildcats, deer and rabbits that inhabit it. Her proficiency with the camera was the reason Hunter was able to convince his editor at the newspaper to send her along, since their regular photographer had come down with the flu.

Hunter and Lisa go through hell in LILITH, literally, as they help the Navy fight a power that is not even supposed to exist. Lisa rides an emotional roller coaster throughout the story and must draw on the strength of her faith in God, in her husband, and in herself. She’s sly, smart and quick-witted, but far from perfect. Her flaws become apparent in LILITH, but I think you’ll find that her humanity outweighs her flaws.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the main protagonist herself: LILITH. Thanks and happy reading!

LILITH: A character study of Hunter Singleton

Since most of the advance word about my new supernatural thriller, LILITH, is kind of a general overview of the book’s storyline, I thought it would be cool to talk about some of the characters in the story. There are actually a number of important people in there, but the main protagonist is a guy named Hunter Singleton.

Hunter is half Cherokee Indian, half white, and was adopted as a baby near a Cherokee reservation by two very special people in a small town called Tahlequah, Oklahoma. They raised him as their own and taught him the ways of the Cherokee so that he could stay in touch with his own heritage, his own roots.

Hunter grew up and joined the Navy to get away from the small town life (much as I did) and hopefully have some adventures. After that, he went back to school and got his degree in journalism, then interned at some small newspapers before getting on as a reporter in River City, North Carolina (yeah, that’s me, too!)

Hunter met his wife, Lisa, while interviewing her for a story. Hunter forgot to tape the interview, which Lisa found quite funny, and they decided to start dating and eventually ended up getting married. What happened between then and LILITH can be found in my first novel, (shameless promotion alert) DIABLERO. I can assure you, it’s quite terrifying and not for the faint of heart. But they made it through reasonably unscathed.

Hunter is thirty-ish and in good physical shape, but not very tall. However, due to his Native American heritage, he is dark-skinned, dark-haired and dark-eyed, which most women seem to find attractive. He also has a dry, acerbic wit, which gets him into trouble.

He is not musically inclined, though he loves good rock and roll and some classical music, and generally likes doing outdoorsy stuff like hiking and camping. Hunter is a black belt in Wing Chun Kung Fu, which he learned from his wife. He believes in self-sufficiency and dislikes taking handouts from anyone. He loves his wife and will probably make a great father when their new baby is delivered.

Hunter and Lisa did have some marriage problems due to a miscarriage by Lisa, which you can read about in DIABLERO, but things have been patched up and they are going full-throttle in dealing with this new danger in LILITH.

There are some introspective moments in LILITH where you will discover more about Hunter and his past, about his shortcomings and failures, what makes him tick, and also about why Lisa finds him so irresistible. He gets into quite a jam in LILITH – one which, at first, seems impossible to overcome. Does he make it out, or not? Find out when LILITH is released in January!

Next time, I’ll talk about Hunter’s cohort in all of this, his wife, Lisa, who I think you will find a very interesting character in her own right. Ciao!

Writing the supernatural action-thriller

I have always loved reading horror—Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, Edward Lee—I can’t explain it. It just appeals to me. I guess the thought of flawed humans overcoming insurmountable odds and saving the world from some inhuman beast or life-threatening super-organism is just, well…cool. Sure, sometimes the good guy or woman dies at the end, but that’s life. Heroes are willing to pay the ultimate price so that others may live.

One of my other loves in fiction is the thriller, whether it’s politics, crime, military, whatever. Brad Thor, Vince Flynn, Nelson DeMille, Lee Child, James Patterson, Clive Cussler—I love ‘em all.

But for a long time, there seemed to be a lack of novels that really mixed action/adventure and supernatural horror into one story. I wanted something that was creepy, but that also moved along at a good clip and had memorable characters. There were very few novelists that were doing that kind of thing—Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, John Saul, William Meikle and Jeremy Robinson are some names that come to mind.

So I decided that I would try to create stories I would like to read, something that incorporated both supernatural horror and action/adventure. I had written some short stories, but I wanted something that would keep readers enthralled for a few days. My first undertaking was DIABLERO, a story about modern-day voodoo and the resurrection of a three-hundred year old pirate, Blackbeard. 

 

I got some good reviews for that book, sold a few hundred copies with Nightbird Publishing and Crossroad Press. But for my next story, I wanted something even bigger involving the CIA, the military, the supernatural, and some human drama. So I took characters from my first novel, Hunter and Lisa Singleton, and put them into my new book.

LILITH is a supernatural creature who takes possession of the crew of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, and is then set free in the streets of Manhattan after it gets demolished by a huge storm. It was a very fun book to write.

My next novel, tentatively titled PRIMORDIAL, will be on an even bigger scale, believe it or not. Did I tell you I want my stakes to be high? Even the young adult sci-fi novel I’m working on is high-octane. Can I help it if I like things to move along at a good clip? And guns? And explosions? And…and…oh, sorry. I get carried away. But you get the picture.

I tried writing “literary” horror. Yeah, that didn’t work out. I kept falling asleep and drooling on the keyboard. Shorted out a lot of PCs. Don’t get me wrong, I love the classics—Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow—and I owe my career to them. But modern times demand that we stretch our writing chops to mix genres that may not have been previously incorporated, e.g., the vampire western, the zombie literary classic, the sci-fi detective, and so on.

So now, I present to you the supernatural action-thriller. I hope you like it.

Chasing the Fame Train

A lot of writers think that chasing the latest fads in the literary field is the way to a publishing contract. The misunderstood vampire, the wild-eyed zombie, the child-wizard, the gin-soaked, smart-mouthed private investigator—you know the ones—the tired, clichéd, overused characters.

Well, I used to be one of those writers. I was ready and willing to jump on that fame train.

But I have learned that if your writing doesn’t come from the heart and is instead motivated by the hope of an expanding wallet, you are headed down a rocky path and toward a perpetually empty bank account. Literary agents’ in-boxes are filled with queries from would-be authors following the latest trends or trying to copy the styles of famous writers. But those authors are traveling a dead-end street and they don’t even realize it.

I read blogs—lots and lots of blogs—by literary agents that receive anywhere from 30 to 100 queries a day and one theme that occurs throughout these blogs is this: Write in your own voice and don’t follow trends. So why try to be someone you’re not? Write what you love. Write what you would like to read, but use your own words and ideas, not someone else’s. Yeah, vampire stories are the schizzle right now, but that market could soon fizzle and you’re left standing with manuscript in hand and nowhere to turn.

Instead of trying to figure out what agents and publishers are looking for and writing for the market, write for yourself and try to find a niche—something that no one else is writing about. Make it unique and interesting, make your characters jump off the page, make your story crackle with excitement!

My latest manuscript has been requested by no less than five literary agents and I’m still waiting to hear back from several more because I chose not to follow trends. I read the latest books by authors who write in my field, not because I want to copy them, but to make sure I DON’T copy them. I try to keep an eye on the latest trends to make sure I DON’T follow them. My characters and my stories are unique because I dare to be different, and hopefully it will pay off in a big way.

But if not, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I have integrity and will continue to have integrity because I write stories that come from my own heart and mind and no one else’s. If the fame train leaves the station without me, then so be it. I'll take the bus.