Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!
Today’s question is: Are any of your characters fans of a particular sports team?
And remember to pay a visit to my fellow writers to see what they have come up with. You can find their works here!
This week’s topic is going to be a short and sweet one for me. The simple answer is no. But I’ll expand on it a bit more at least. This isn’t by design. That is to say, I didn’t intentionally make my characters to dislike or be ambivalent towards sports. It’s more the case that sports haven’t featured in my book. They don’t feature in my work in progress either. In all fairness, I am not entirely sure why either. I am quite the armchair athlete. I love a bit of football, Formula 1, Moto GP, tennis, American football. Even, on occasion a bit of golf. When it’s an olympics year I try to watch as many events as the time zones allow.
So why don’t sports feature in Chasing Shadows, or my work in progress? It’s a simple answer really – they don’t really serve a purpose in the plot as it stands. It’s not overly relevant in the existing storyline. That said, there could be a place for them in a future story. Perhaps something involving airships. But then again, it would have to fit the narrative. I’ve always felt if it doesn’t serve the story then it doesn’t merrit a place in the writing. Given how much I enjoy making up the world in which my book exists, if sport does make an appearance it won’t be an exact facsimile of existing sports, it’d be a bastardisation of something we hace, made to suit the world. Lets see what comes up in future adventures for Edison and Selah.
Steven Smith 
I’ve included a couple of random sports references in my books. More for window dressing, they don’t drive my plots.
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It’s hard to work sports into the plot with adult characters. Yes, my characters do things personally for exercise and entertainment. Some of those activities are sports. None of my characters are huge spectators, probably because their “god” isn’t a huge sports fan. I toss things in sometimes to make them human and to remind my readers that they lived ordinary lives before Armaggedon. Frankly, I don’t even notice when other writers don’t include sports references in their books. It rarely serves the plot, so it’s not missed.
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Exactly. If it served a purpose I would include them, but I won’t just force it.
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Writing always feels bogus when we force something into it just because we think it needs to be there. I was doing beta exchanges with a fairly talented writer who always had some sort of social justice angle in every book and after a while, I just felt like he was beating a dead horse. I found myself rolling my eyes and was trying to figure out how to tell him I wasn’t interested in continuing when he objected to Shane’s giving into God in Winter’s Reckoning. He doesn’t trust me to not turn the character into milque toast, but I know the future and milque toast is not an option. Maybe slightly more compassion for the people he previously was willing to kill.
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I’m not a big sports fan, but I work with folks who are. I manage to drop in references to sports in my books, but not in a major way.
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