Thursday, April 10, 2014

The Infamous Cat Incident


That's how I think of it, after I started this thread on Absolute Write to discuss something that happened in my third novel. I wanted an idea of how readers might react to the antagonist harming an animal, and... well, I got that idea, all right.

Though learning how people felt and discussing the issue gave me enough material for a short article on the topic, and that appeared today on Writers Helping Writers. Check it out! And a big thank you to Angela and Becca for hosting me. I love their thesaurus collections, which are just a great, easy-to-browse resource for writers.

Plus, The Deepest Ocean is now on All Romance ebooks and I'm at 64K/100K on The Coldest Sea. So it's shaping up to be a pretty good day. :)

2 comments:

Randall said...

I couldn't read very far into the thread, to be honest. I found it disturbing how many people would rather that you(r character) tortured and/or casually murdered a human than a pet.

When I read something like that I think of the old movie I saw once (I think it was a Sly Stallone vehicle back in the 80s) in which they save the dog, but the badly wounded black man is sent floating off down the tunnel . . . (okay, it was a golden retriever, but still . . .)!

I mean, I love cats, and I'm not very fond of most people, but if it was a choice between saving a cat and saving a person, well, I'd be grateful that all or nothing dilemmas are mostly porn for philosophers and as such rarely come up in real life.

Marian Perera said...

Agreed. I found it very disturbing that a few people were specifically fine with the torture of a baby, but didn't want the cat to go overboard.

Oh well. As one of the comments said, these choices/preferences are not rational. They're emotional, and as such, can't be reasoned with. All I can do is to be aware of them and prepared for any such responses from readers.