I’m not sure every reader will get it, but for me writing the Evelyn novels has been all about finding fun ways of hearing the sweet parricidal Evelyn apologize for how brutally unfair and oppressive our society is. It’s important to note that she’s not your usual survival-of-the-fittest “Darwinist”. Evelyn’s not boastfully honest about how hard society is. She apologetically honest.
Evelyn has a good heart in a lot of ways. She empathizes with human suffering, despite not wanting to. In EEE she explains that her brother Frank was numb with his suffering. With reference to a Gregory Peck movie, she says, “Bubba considered himself already dead.” She got her younger brother out of the secure medical facility in that novel. Then she delivered the paperboy Sonny from a lethal injection in EDP. And in EBP, she eases the suffering of the sons of her poor broken executives.
This is the process: Come up with a telling outrageous insight into our slavish society and the horrible ways people deal with the suffering inflicted on them; then find an exciting dramatic way to express that insight; then find an clever interesting way to fit it into the storyline.
The Trilogy
Evelyn Explains Everything (Book 1 of the Evelyn Series)
Evelyn Delivers the Paperboy (Book 2 of the Evelyn Series)
Evelyn Buys a Pardon (Current work in progress)
The first two novels in the Evelyn saga are available on Amazon Kindle and via Smashwords.
In deference to my ghost collaborator who sadly (and humorously at times) drank himself into and out of a series of homes for inebriates while I was writing Evelyn Delivers the Paperboy – my second novel – please donate a dollar or whatever you can spare to Alabama Children’s Hospital Foundation, 1600 Seventh Avenue South, Birmingham, AL 35233, or online. He had a niece and I have a daughter who were treated there, so this is not entirely a cynical marketing ploy aimed at getting you to dig deep and come up with the money I’m charging for reading my first novel Evelyn Explains Everything, available for 99 cents and worth every penny. Thank you.