I’m getting excited for my new release, Bygora Vandos, which will be out during the second week of October.  This book is the second volume in The Sinclair V-Logs series and sees Sam Sinclair take on an undercover job that ends up costing him dearly.

In Bygora Vandos, we find out more about Sam as a man, a little of his history and a couple of the most powerful events in his life that have shaped him and the way he interacts with people.  Like all people, Sam has experienced bad times and understanding them helps us to get to know him as a person and aids us in connecting with him in a much closer way.  Sam is an interesting and sometimes, complex character.  A man with a strict code most of the time, he understands that from time to time, circumstances call for him to step outside of his code.  Although he doesn’t like having to do this, occasionally it’s necessary for him to get the job done.  Like all people, Sam sometimes makes mistakes, he’s a person not a robot and giving him flaws makes him real.  Nobody is perfect.

As you are no doubt aware, when meeting someone new, it takes time to get to know them fully.  As time goes on you find out more about the person, their likes and dislikes, their morals, what motivates them and the things that get them down.  This is how all of our relationships develop, it’s normal human interaction and I feel this to be a very important aspect of character building in fiction.  Sometimes, an author gives you everything there is to know about a character right from the start, and that disappoints me greatly.  Without anything more to discover, the character becomes boring and I quickly lose interest, and I’m sure it’s the same for most people.

When building your characters, remember to hold back, especially if you plan more books with the same character.  It gives us something to look forward to in later books so that we buy them to find out more about the character we’ve come to like from your previous volume.  As my dad used to say when he caught Mother and I talking about women’s dress sense, “it’s not what you show that titillates us, it’s what you don’t show.”