Both Ends Burning (Whistleblower Trilogy Book 3) (18 page)

Books by Jim Heskett

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For anyone who has ever appeared as a tiny avatar in the corner of a Powerpoint presentation, blabbing about adding value while leveraging sales verticals and nurturing organic growth potential. You know who you are. Just don’t forget to put people ahead of products.

AFTERWORD

Among writers, there are two camps. Plotters and Pantsers. Plotters are the people who, before they begin writing, take pains to make outlines and plans for what’s going to happen throughout the story. They write copious notes on characters, events, and plot arcs, so the entire basic structure of the story is there before they ever put pen to page.

Pantsers—also known as discovery writers—don’t do any of that stuff. They start with an idea, or an intersection of ideas, and they just write without foreknowledge of what’s going to happen next. They let the story take them wherever it takes them.

Despite what you may hear from some writers who are firmly in one camp or the other, neither of the methods is superior. They’re just two different ways to make art. Stephen King is a noted pantser, because he likes to throw characters into dangerous situations and then watch them struggle to get out. New York Times bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson is a strict plotter, and it seems to work out well for him. Because he sells a crap-ton of books, is what I’m saying.

The point of all this is to explain how I came about this story you’ve just read. I had always been a plotter. I left myself room to change, add, and delete later, but I always started with a firm knowledge of the beginning, middle, and end of my stories. Where the plot twists would happen. Exactly when and how the characters would grow and change as a result of the story.

Before writing WOUNDED ANIMALS, I’d had a story idea about a young man who infiltrates a religious cult to save his sister, and I plotted it all out. Spent weeks doing research on religious cults, making outlines, writing character sketches. But there was no
magic
to the story… I couldn’t get excited about it. Couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.

Then, one night, while at a comedy club, the comedian onstage made a joke about a guy turning water into wine. The idea hit me…
what would you do if you saw a random stranger turn water into wine at a bar?

And thus, WOUNDED ANIMALS was born.

I went home that night and furiously wrote out the first chapter of Whistleblower Book 1, with no notion of where it would go next. So I dipped into the idea folder I keep, and found one I liked: a guy comes home from a business trip to find his wife missing, and a dead man in his living room.

Finally, at that time, I had a day job as a software trainer, so it seemed a natural choice to give Candle the same occupation. I combined all of these concepts into a rough, two-paragraph long story idea. Then I went about writing, having mostly no idea what was going to come next. For a lifelong plotter, the freedom of letting the characters act for themselves was exhilarating.

When I finished the first draft of WOUNDED ANIMALS, I had no idea it would become a trilogy. I’d left the ending vague, and my beta readers kept asking,
so what happens next
?

And I said, “well, I don’t know, but I’d like to find out, just as much as you do.”

Like most of my ideas, what to do next came to me when I was walking my dog Kemba. And that idea was
what IntelliCraft is really up to.

Just like that, I had the idea for my series. I had to go back and make changes to the first book in order to make it work, of course, but the seed of the idea took hold, and I got excited to write it.

The Whistleblower Trilogy has been a lot of firsts for me. I’d never written anything besides short stories entirely in the first person. I’ve always liked using multiple points of view to create suspense… letting the reader in on secrets via one character’s POV that another character knows nothing about. But writing in first-person POV seemed like a great challenge. Plus, Candle was so much fun to write, I had to try it.

It’s also my first genuine series. Sure, I’ve written The Five Suns Saga, but that isn’t so much a series as it is a collection of stories told in the same universe. The Whistleblower Trilogy is my first attempt to write a complete, three-story volume of a single character arc.

But… is it complete? The ending may have a left some lingering and unresolved issues. What did Heath mean about Candle’s mom? Who was Roman Carter and why did Heath have a safe deposit box in his name?

Someday, I’ll write a prequel that fills in some of these gaps.

Thank you for reading this far. I hope my little experiment worked, and I also hope I can continue to tell stories such as this one.

Jim Heskett

March 2015

Broomfield, Colorado

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Heskett was born in the wilds of Oklahoma, raised by a pack of wolves with a station wagon and a membership card to the local public swimming pool. Just like the man in the John Denver song, he moved to Colorado in the summer of his 27th year, and never looked back. Aside from an extended break traveling the world, he hasn't let the Flatirons mountains out of his sight.

He fell in love with writing at the age of fourteen with a copy of Stephen King's The Shining. Poetry became his first outlet for teen angst, then later some terrible screenplays, and eventually short and long fiction. In between, he worked a few careers that never quite tickled his creative toes successfully, and hasn't ever forgotten about Stephen King. You can find him currently huddled over a laptop in an undisclosed location in Colorado, dreaming up ways to kill beloved characters.

He blogs at his own site and hosts the Indie Authors Podcast. You can also scour the internet to find the occasional guest post for various writing websites such as Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, Quips and Tips for Writers, the Blood-Red Pencil, and a few others scattered here and there. He believes the huckleberry is the king of berries and refuses to be persuaded in any other direction.

If you’d like to ask a question, get a free digital copy of any of his books in exchange for a review, or just to say hi, stop by the
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