Thank You Readers

Good evening everyone,

First, thank you so much for following Brooklyn’s story these last few months. I am extremely proud of this character and story and appreciate all the love and support you have given me throughout this journey. Though Brooklyn will only be available online for one more week, you’ll hopefully be able to read her full adventures in an actual book this holiday season!

Brooklyn was born from a very simple question: what makes a good person go bad? It was directly tied to a topic I was studying in a college theology class: why are good people punished? In other words, why do bad things happen to good people?

At the time I was writing a novel about a lifelong criminal, Heston Snow. At the time, Brooklyn was nothing more than a side character, a cop who appeared briefly at a crime scene. At most, she was in a sentence, maybe two, but the theology class got me thinking. Heston was born into the criminal world. She was destined to be a con artist and thief from the moment she was born and spent her whole childhood learning the art of deception. She knew nothing else. To her, the criminal world wasn’t wrong or evil. It was a way of life. Survival. Right for the wrong reasons. 

But what if Heston Snow wasn’t born into the criminal world? How else would she become this world renowned con artist? Was there a single event to push her over the edge? What would force her to give up her deepest ideologies and join a world she despised? What would turn a hardworking, law abiding citizen into a hardened criminal?

And so… the character of Brooklyn Pieper was born. It was clear Brooklyn was her own leading character. She wasn’t meant to be in the background of someone else’s story. The problem was, she didn’t have a plot. I conjured every aspect of this character, from her physical description to her mentality to her thought process to her emotional stability. I gave her a backstory worthy of a screenplay and invented her family members and friends, including her dog Sokka. I just couldn’t come up with a good story. 

Not that I didn’t have ideas. At one point, Brooklyn was a murdered police detective trying to solve her murder from the grave, but the story died almost as quickly as she did. Everything I wrote felt forced. It didn’t fit with Brooklyn’s history. Nothing really felt right, so I put Brooklyn on a shelf and worked on other things. I finished Heston Snow, started her sequel and wrote two other novels, all the while waiting to give Brooklyn a life she deserved. 

When I came up with Nathaniel McGinty, everything fell into place. Again, he was originally supposed to be a character in a different novel, but the Boston mobster seemed the perfect villain for Brooklyn. Both headstrong and stubborn. Both family people in their own way. He was the adversary Brooklyn needed, and from there, everything fell into place. The last piece was the prompt I found on Pinterest about the library with books about every person in the world.

From there, Brooklyn flowed. Her story finally lived after nine years of waiting. Hopefully, the years were worth the wait. 

Up next… well, I’m not sure what’s up next. I’m fine tuning two projects, “Unwritten” and “When the Hawk Runs”, and starting something new. A vote for Brooklyn’s cover art will hopefully be on the blog soon, along with a chance to be a beta reader, if you so desire. A Christmas romance is also in the works because who wants to write something dull and gloomy during the holiday season. 

As always, thank you. 

Sincerely, 

Me (K. P. Whaley)