Years ago (and still applies today), the experts were telling fiction writers that in order to really know their main character, they must come up with a character profile sheet for them and definitely applies to all your characters as well. This is a good practice because once you know all the ins and outs of all your characters, the book flows better and allows the author to get inside the head of each of their characters.
We decided to ask authors if they would like to come up with a character sketch of their main character, throwing in a few unique questions to make it really fun!
Today we have David Myles Robinson stopping by on his blog tour with a character sketch of his main character, Russell Blaze. Enjoy!
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Learn more about Russell Blaze!
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Name of Character: Russell Blaze
Age: 17 through 70
Eye Color: Green
Hair Color: Brown
Birthplace: Los Angeles, CA
Marital Status: Married twice
Children: Two
Place of Residence: Berkeley, CA
Description of Home: Dark wood shingle, two story home on a tree-lined street near the University of California
Dominant Character Trait: Inquisitive
Best Friend: James Cordell
Enemies and Why: Amanda Rutledge – Russ could expose her
Temperament: Introspective
Ambition: To become a great writer/journalist
Educational Background: College dropout
Philosophy of Life: Live and let live unless you are evil
Bad Habits: Too inquisitive
Talents: Writing
Hobby or Hobbies: Writing
Why is Character Likeable? Russ is empathetic and passionate
Favorite Pig Out Food: None that we know of
Character Mini-Interview:
Every New Year’s I resolve to: be a better husband and father
Nobody knows I am: The brother of a white-nationalist murderer
I wish: There was no racism in this world
The worse part of my life is: Living with memories of my deceased wife and son
I want to teach my children that: We are all in this together.
A good time for me is: The completion of a story that I know is good and may do some good
The worse advice my father gave me is: My father died too young for me to remember any advice he gave me
When I feel sorry for myself I: Think about my wife, Mary, and our son, Cody
My friends like me because: I’m loyal and empathetic.
My major accomplishment is: Becoming an award-winning journalist.
My most humbling experience was: Embarrassing myself with my best friend, James, after comparing the two of us to the two characters in Siddhartha.
Meet the Author
David Myles Robinson has always had a passion for writing. During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, while in college, Robinson worked as a free-lance writer for several magazines and was a staff writer for a weekly minority newspaper in Pasadena, California, called The Pasadena Eagle. However, as he himself admits, upon graduating from San Francisco State University, he decided against the ‘starving writer’ route and went to law school, at the University of San Francisco School of Law. It was there that he met his wife, Marcia Waldorf. After graduating from law school in 1975, the two moved to Honolulu, Hawaii and began practicing law. Robinson became a trial lawyer, specializing in personal injury and workers’ compensation law. Waldorf eventually became a District Court and ultimately a Circuit Court judge.
Upon retiring in 2010, Robinson completed his first novel, Unplayable Lie, which was published by BluewaterPress LLC, in 2010. He has since published five more novels, three of which are legal thrillers set in Honolulu: Tropical Lies, Tropical Judgments, Tropical Doubts, and Tropical Deception. His other three novels are The Pinochet Plot, Son of Saigon, and Words Kill. Robinson has also published a book of short travel stories, Conga Line on the Amazon.
Robinson and Waldorf divided their time between Honolulu and their second home in Taos, NM for seven years before finally deciding to see what it’s like to be full-time mainlanders again. They now live in Taos, where Robinson can pursue his non-writing passions of golf, ski, and travel.
WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:
Website: davidmylesrobinson.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/DMRobinsonWrite
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DavidMylesRobinson
Instagram – http://www.instagram.com/davidmylesrobinson
Inside the Book
Title: WORDS KILL
Author: David Myles Robinson
Publisher: Terra Nova Books
Pages: 250
Genre: Thriller / Suspense
BOOK BLURB:
Famed reporter Russell Blaze is dead. It appears to be an accident, but after Russ’s funeral, his son, Cody, finds a letter in which his father explains that the death may have been murder. It directs Cody to Russ’s unfinished memoir for clues as to what may have happened. The opening words are: On the night of October 16, 1968, I uttered a sentence that would haunt me for the rest of my life. The sentence was, “Someone should kill that motherfucker.”
As Cody delves into the memoir, a window opens into a tragic past and thrusts the still-burning embers of another time’s radical violence into the political reality of the present. History that once seemed far away becomes a deeply personal immersion for Cody into the storied heyday of the Haight: drugs, sex, war protesters, right-wing militias, ground-breaking journalism—and the mysterious Gloria, who wanders into his father’s pad one day to just “crash here for a while until things calm down.”
Cody discovers aspects of his father’s life he never knew, and slowly begins to understand the significance of those words his father spoke in 1968.
Words Kill is a story of loss, violence, and racism; love, hate, and discovery. It is a story of then … and now.