One of the skills one must possess to have fun while writing fiction is finding ways to undercut dour seriousness. While I’m not saying everyone should put on clown makeup, I am advocating coming up with character-driven ways to make a situation interesting.

Let’s say someone is being questions by a Sheriff about a murder. Usually such men are dour and serious. It’s a tool used to intimidate the truth out of suspects. But what if you had a Sheriff trying to bottle-feed a baby while questioning a suspect?

It sounds silly, but if your Sheriff happens to be keeping a secret that his wife has left him and his newborn son? Well, then it’s not as silly. It’s amusing, but there’s some pathos to it.

That’s what I’m shooting for, rather than just tossing in anything I can think of, including the copper kitchen sinks.

I’ve decided with this novel I’m working on that it’s time to have fun with my characters for a change; while I’m treating each character with respect, I want them to be light, amusing and fun to read about. Dour characters have their place, but I want to have fun with fiction-writing for a change.

Fortunately, with the novel I’m working on now, I have characters who lend themselves to this light treatment. This is what drew me to them almost a year ago when I first began work on the manuscript.

Besides, if I make it fun (though not as fun, to be sure, as Outer Banks rentals), it’ll be a lot easier to want to find time to write.

OK, so the running total of hard drives I’ve been through in the past 18 months just reached four. I’m now on my fifth drive and this time I ordered a high-quality, well-reviewed unit with a two-year factory warranty. Most drives come with 90 days, so hopefully the longer warranty is an indication of some sturdiness on the part of the newest drive.

Sure, I could have had warranty repair done by my local Nerd Herders, but they were responsible for the last one, so forget cheap parts provided free under warranty and free labor; it was time to buy quality and do it myself. Same goes for anything you need, like RV insurance: quality matters.

It’s done, and thanks to my flash drive my novel was completely unaffected. Let’s just hope this hard drive lasts longer than the six months or less average I’ve been suffering through lately.

Thanks to our blowout eight-part interview with author Charlaine Harris, ScriptSuperhero.com has been a much busier place these days. Hopefully Ms. Harris will benefit from it as well, though her star is so firm in the literary heavens by now, I’m not sure there’s much more we can do for her, other than what we did, which was attempt to cover some ground that most interviews never delve into.

But now it’s over, the cardboard displays are down, and the next step for ScriptSuperhero.com is to get back to talking about the craft of writing… at least until the next time we can land a big interview with a big-name author. It only took us three years or so to land this one, so…

Back to business.