Character Building

By Jessica Grace Coleman

Character Building is a short story, also available in the Grown By The Wicked Moon collection by Jessica Grace Coleman.

When Robyn (a famous author) decides to write her masterpiece, she’s amazed to find how fast the words are flowing onto the page. But when she visits a small town in Wales to get some inspiration, things take a turn for the worse. Will she finish ‘The Crickley Bay Chronicles’? Or will her ambitions just be too big this time?

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Jessica Grace Coleman
• Release date: Sep 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311073341

Jessica Grace Coleman

Jessica Grace Coleman was born in Stafford, England and raised in the nearby village of Little Haywood, a quaint English location that would later be remodelled into Beth Powers’ home village in the Little Forest novels.Jessica has so far self-published five books in the Little Forest series: The Former World, Memento Mori, The Exalted, Carnival Masquerade and The Gloaming. She has also released her first short story collection, Grown By The Wicked Moon, featuring 14 weird and wonderful tales, as well as her non-fiction titles, Creative Ways To Start Creative Writing, Volumes 1, 2 & 3 and Write Your Life: The Ultimate Life Hack For Achieving Your Dreams. The Downfall is the first book in The Downfall Trilogy, and the sequels, The Rebellion and The Revolution, will be released soon.Jessica also runs her own proofreading, editing and ghost writing business, Coleman Editing, working for clients all over the world. You can find out more about Coleman Editing at www.colemanediting.co.uk. She also runs the Write Together Academy, home of the Write Your Life Method, helping people achieve their dreams through writing – find out more at www.writetogetheracademy.com.You can also find out more about Jessica, her available books, and her works in progress at her website: www.jessicagracecoleman.com and you can contact her at [e-mail]. You can also sign up for her mailing list – where you’ll be the first to hear about her new releases and reader competitions – at www.jessicagracecoleman.com.

Book preview

Character Building

A Short Story

by

Jessica Grace Coleman

Copyright © Jessica Grace Coleman 2015

Published by Darker Times

Stafford, UK.

Ebook Edition September 2015

Distributed by Smashwords

Jessica Grace Coleman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved in all media. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author and/or publisher.

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events or localities is entirely coincidental.

This story is dedicated to all of my writer friends

Also Available From Jessica Grace Coleman

Little Forest Series

The Former World

Memento Mori

The Exalted

Carnival Masquerade

The Gloaming

Short Story Collections

Grown By The Wicked Moon

Non-Fiction

Creative Ways To Start Creative Writing

Volumes 1, 2 & 3

Table of Contents

Character Building

Want a Free Book?

Acknowledgements

About The Author

Also Available from Jessica Grace Coleman

Character Building

Robyn Reddick was an award-winning novelist, a master (well, mistress) of her craft, an inspiration to countless writers all over the world.

She was also well and truly bored out of her mind.

Having released twenty books in her ‘Hunter Bloomberg’ crime series, she was financially stable and yes, she was proud, but now it was time… time to kill off Hunter and start on something else.

OK, so maybe not kill him, just put him on the backburner for a while. If she killed him, she had no idea what her fans might do (‘Misery’, anyone?), and if she was really being truthful with herself, it wasn’t the character of Hunter she was fed up with; it was her.

Robyn Reddick just didn’t know what else she could do with Hunter and his world of insane crime fighting and punchy one-liners. She’d dragged it out until there were no more ideas left, and it didn’t seem right to keep pounding out rubbish novels just so the Hunter fans could read more about his troubled love life, his ripped muscles, and his habit of always catching the bad guys just in the nick of time. It was always the same, and it was getting old.

It was time for a change.

Robyn had come to this conclusion a month or so ago, and had immediately closed down the Hunter Bloomberg book she was working on, opening instead a fresh document in her word processor, on which she typed out ‘New Project’ at the top of the page.

It had stayed as a blank page for an hour or so while she pondered what she really wanted to write.

Her first thought was that she didn’t want to write another book from a male first-person perspective; she’d been there, she’d done that, and she was so over it. The idea of telling a story purely from a female character’s point of view flashed through her mind, but she dismissed that, too. There was only so much you could do with first person (something she thought every time she wrote a new Hunter Bloomberg novel), and she wanted to do something bigger in scope.

She wanted to know what several characters were doing at once, she wanted to know how each of them felt and why they reacted to each situation like they did. With first person, the reader was always left to guess what was going on inside the other characters’ heads. So, Robyn would write third person (the thought of second person had never really occurred to her as a viable option), and that left the possibilities wide open.

Why tell the