I had the pleasure of writing a guest post for the talented Stuart Jaffe! You can see it here where I discuss what my musical inspirations for writing have been.

He then very graciously returned the favor and wrote a post for my blog, which I must say I don’t think I deserve, and I hesitated to post at the risk of seeming self-serving. Thank you Stuart!

I first met Janine this year at Ravencon and then again at ConCarolinas. We hit it off from the start and I suspect she’ll be in my writing life for many years to come. When it came to writing this guest post for her blog (thanks for having me, BTW), I went over several possibilities and finally settled on something that wasn’t in my list at all: People.

Too often we get so involved in writing a story, creating a book, marketing a book, garnering reviews, panicking over sales numbers, cheering over sales numbers, up and down, round and round, that we forget the simple fact that all of this is about people. It’s about writers (who are, generally speaking, people) sharing stories with readers (who are, most certainly, people). It’s about human interaction. Even if you and I never meet, we interact through the story.

It may sound a bit airy, but it’s truly the core of what we are doing. It doesn’t matter the story, either. The Way of the Black Beast is the first in my post-apocalyptic fantasy series with magic from tattoos, blues guitarist/assassins, and a whole host of mutated beasties, but at its core, it is about a woman protecting a boy while dealing with her own twisted family issues. My latest novel, Southern Bound, is a paranormal-mystery about a researcher who discovers his office is haunted by a 1940s detective. There’s a cool mystery surrounding North Carolina history mixed with ghosts, curses, and witches, but the story is really about the love between a man and his wife. It’s always been about people. And by making our stories about people, writers connect with readers.

This may all seem rather obvious, but the obvious things are usually the ones we forget so easily. What brought it all in focus for me was thinking about Janine and politics. In this country, we’ve been living through a particularly volatile time lately with everybody drawing lines in the sand and nobody listening to the other, let alone uttering that dreaded word — compromise. And yet, on a human scale, a one-on-one scale, we can still connect with each other without the vitriol that spews all over the comment section of any news article on the Internet.

Janine exemplifies that warm, gracious, human side we should all strive for. And she didn’t even pay me to write that. Perhaps that’s one reason why she’s met with success publishing her book. Perhaps on a deeper, subconscious level, we can all sense when we are being told a story that touches the human side of us.

Sheesh. I didn’t intend for this post to get so heavy but then again, if we didn’t stop once-in-a-while and write about these things, the Internet would have nothing left except porn, comedy, and cats. So, now that I’ve done that, go ahead and return to your porn, comedy, and cats.

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Stuart Jaffe is the author of Southern Bound, The Malja Chronicles, After The Crash, as well as the short story collection, 10 Bits of My Brain. Numerous other short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He is the co-host of The Eclectic Review — a podcast about science, art, and well, everything. For those who keep count, the latest animal listing is as follows: five cats, one albino corn snake, one Brazilian black tarantula, three aquatic turtles, one tortoise, assorted fish, two lop-eared rabbits, seven chickens, and a horse. Thankfully, the chickens and the horse do not live inside the house.

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