Guest post: "The Dark Inside: A Different Perspective," by Donna Galanti, author of the Amazon bestseller 'A Hidden Element'
After
I published A Human Element, the
story before A Hidden Element, I
couldn’t let go of the characters. Readers wanted a sequel but I always felt it
was a single tale to be told. And yet, the characters in the first book
wouldn’t let me go.
And
one morning I woke up with a vision for book 2, A Hidden Element, and I wrote that book. And still, I couldn’t let these old and new
characters go. I wanted to know more about what their dark lives were like
before their stories in the books, and so I wrote a short story collection
about them, appropriately called, The Dark Inside.
I’ve
always been fascinated by the terrible things we humans can do, and what stops
us from crossing that line. Many people don’t stop, but thankfully many more
people do. Writing about characters that cross the line lets me feel what it
might be like, in my imagination. How easy it would be to pick up a knife and
stab someone? How easy it would be to jerk the car to the left and hit someone
on the road? Of course, I never would! But I want to feel that passion to do it
– for my character’s sake.
In
A Hidden Element Laura Fieldstone,
who fights to get her son back from an evil force, worries he will succumb to
the dark side. “Light and dark reside side by side,” she says. Just like love
and hate walk the same line, they both come from the same place. A place of
passion.
To
me, writing is all about passion – feeling the good and feeling the bad. And I
want to feel it all. To explore the twin sides of our human nature: the good
inside us, the dark inside us.
In
A Hidden Element we begin with Caleb,
the son of Adrian, forced against his will by his father to a new land. We
watch, through his eyes, as his father wields his evil power over innocent folk
and how he vows to never become like him. I originally wrote this scene from
Adrian’s point of view, until I realized the story was Caleb’s story to tell.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Donna Galanti writes murder and
mystery with a dash of steam as well as middle grade adventure fiction. She is
the author of books 1 and 2 in the paranormal suspense Element Trilogy, A Human
Element and A Hidden Element, the short story collection The Dark Inside, and Joshua
and The Lightning Road (Books 1 and 2, 2015). She’s lived from England
as a child, to Hawaii as a U.S. Navy photographer. She now lives in
Pennsylvania with her family in an old farmhouse. It has lots of writing nooks,
fireplaces, and stink bugs, but she’s still wishing for a castle
again—preferably with ghosts.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DonnaGalanti
Thanks so much for having me on today! I love talking about writing from the dark side - with a dash of hope. Hope gives us the world :)
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