Dropping It Down a Tone or Two

[Peg Herring]

They've taken over my brain again. Characters who I thought were going to be fun and entertaining as they romped through a murder have turned serious, and I can't stop them.

The problem is that I spoke about this book with an agent, and she liked the concept. Believe it or not, this agent actually asked what I was working on, not what I had finished. When I gave her two sketchy plots, she asked for samples of those. That sounded great at the time, an incentive to write the two ideas that have been circling my brain, but will she like the fact that my historical has become darker, with political motivations that I never intended?

All I can do is write what happens, kill them all, and let the agent (who is a little like God to a writer) sort it out.

[Peg Herring]

I know, I know, but oh, the omnipotence!

[Eric Christopherson]

Those gods have clay feet. :)

[I. J. Parker]

Actually, I've never seen any historical time period as unadulterated fun. Neither though, was life in the past always unmitigated suffering. If you were to write historical noir (some people are), that would be more a matter of the incidents in the novel than of the historical period.
Hmm, leaving aside Nazi Germany and the Black plague, perhaps.