How do you feel about killing off characters? Be it book, movie, or show, there is always so much perverse pleasure from a well-deserved and gruesome death of an evil character, and beautiful sorrow in the death of a character we love. We love the emotion; the turmoil and angst. Shows like the Walking Dead and Game of Thrones depend on the tension derived from the sense that no one is safe. Any character could die at any moment. We're biting our nails. We're clenching our tissues. We're clasping our hands with gleeful anticipation. Who is going to be next? And perhaps more importantly, how are they going to meet their end?

I am a happy ending kind of girl, but I have to admit, the death of a much-loved character wrenches emotions from my soul in a way that is both terrible and wonderful at the same time. 

You'll find some of the most creative deaths by Dystopian, Post Apocalyptic, and Sci fi writers. They are diabolically ingenious.

Particularly when it comes to thinking up ways to kill off their characters.

A few of my author friends in the Band of Dystopian Authors and Fans were recently asked:

What is the most gruesome way you've ever killed off a character in your book?
Here are a few of their answers. WARNING: Some answers are quite graphic, proceed at your own risk.

Which answer is your favorite? I'm going to keep collecting answers until I get to 101, so check back or add your own in the comments and I'll include them!

1. Betty Cross: One of my important secondary characters was shot through the heart, after electroshock didn't work. And her daughter, the MC of the book, was forced to watch.
2. C.A. Hoaks: Zombies ate her guts out while she watched....lol.
3. Kayla Howarth: Snapped neck and then a bullet in the head for good measure. Oh, then they burned the body just to be sure.
4. Allyson Gottlieb: Impaled on a piece of glass from a broken window
5. DL Young: buried to the neck in the ground, then stoned to death by an angry mob
6. Michelle Bryan: Leg and dangly bits cut off and eaten by cannibals  😵
7. Larry Davis: Chewed in half by a king-size robotic wolf. Okay, three pieces.
8. Jay Guthrie: Fell in a Vat of Acid and Then A bunch of Fireworks were down the street and as he was walking home they set him on fire so an ambulance was just happening by and they put him out and loaded him up to get 10 blocks and at the Turn in for the ER and Have a Fire truck run into the Ambulance and send it over the embankment across from the Hospital to have it come to rest at the Edge of the Ohio River when a Tug boat Snatches the edge Of the Ambulance and as the guy was making his way out and throw him on Deck of the Tug boat. The Tug boat Captain called the Coast Guard and Air lifted him to The Hospital were they did the Wrong surgery on him and He got Rich and lived Happily ever After.
9. Mike Poeltl: Knife jabbed through a gaping mouth's tongue, exits the lower jaw. Bullet to the head and then skinned for the sport of it. 
10. Allen Gamboa: Eaten by zombies while strapped to a table.
11. Michael Peirce: A zombie threw one of my female troopers onto the abatis full of squirming Zs, impaling her on a stake.
12. Matthew Cox: A large mirror shatters and a rotating cyclone of glass shreds the character's skin off, then fingers, then goes deeper until they're sucked backwards through a planar rift and the mirror reforms like it never broke.
13. Justin Vokey: slowly dissolved by alien digestive enzymes
14. Nick A Braker: Ejected him into space, alone, with only a few hours of oxygen remaining with the knowledge there was no one able to help him. That's a lot of time to ponder your certain death
15. Genesis Blue Davies: Torn to pieces by a cuco.
16. Shawn P. Durnin: Castrated, being crucified to the "T" bar on the back of a tow truck with razor wire, then decapitated. Pleasing. 
17. Caleb Hill: Dying of radiation poisoning while falling in love with an AI. Alone. In a fallout shelter.
18. Brian Parker: Let's see, here are a few of mine from various books I've written: beheading in front of his kids; dismembered and eaten by cannibals; eviscerated and strangled with own intestines; ripped to shreds by mutated badgers (really); helicopter crash; mind taken over and bashed own head into concrete until dead; LOTS of gunshots and explosions; starvation; torture tourism (various forms of torture for a crowd's pleasure); stung and cut in half by giant mutated scorpions; torn apart by zombies... oooh, I know! I killed a squad of Nazis with a giant microwave ray that cooked them from the inside out, their blood boiled and the meat burst through their skin. That was fun. 
19. William Bebb: Eaten be a feral herd of ravenous, yet adorably cute, kittens.
20. Travis Sivart: Crabs tearing at their flesh as they dragged themselves across the debris left by a tidal wave. Oh, and it was a dog. Readers reacted.
21. James Zarzana: Killed quite a few. Hard to pick one.
22. Valerie Lioudis: Fights epic battle against mouse, frying pan in hand smashes through window and falls to driveway below perfect time to get hit by car pulling into garage
23. Alexandre Bouchard: an electric misericorde (icepick like dagger connected to electric current) through the eye socket and the optic nerve channel, then shock the brain to fry it. 
24. Franklin Horton: I had one guy die because someone hid copperhead snakes in the toilet. He sat down, got bit on the testicles, and suffered massive swelling. Died a painful death from urinary retention. Post-apoc situation -- no medical care.
25. Tara Benham: Beheading
26. Michael Dryden-Cripton: Expanding foam. ugh no need to expand on that. lol
27. Martin Berman-Gorvine: Impalement on an iron spike
28. Stephanie Crabtree: Too many to pick. All horrible torture.
29. Katy Walker: Head cut off by a sword made out of glass shards.
30. Ian D Moore: I had my lead character build what's called a Guillotine Snare using thin wire, a tree branch, pliers and a couple of well-placed nails. When activated, the wire cut clean through the victim at forty-five degrees from her left hip to top right shoulder. As her left arm fell to the floor, her body began to slide as her legs still struggled to balance her severed torso.
31. Brea Behn Author: Burned, stabbed and then fell to his death.
32. Alfonso Acunia: 10 of my Main Characters died in One Big Battle They Got Blown up Eaten stabbed Lost a duel won a duel then died Burned Dissolved Electrocuted Shot Fell off a Terrace crushed Run over by a MonsteTruck plane Exploded.... but the side that they fought for won
33. Lara Fanning: This question haha. Only on BoD. I'm about to have a character skinned alive by a demonic entity  😐Luckily the fellow doesn't die and is healed as it's set in a fantasy world.
34. Jason Levii O'Hara: most gruesome? it's a tossup. I have killed so many characters in different ways that I have really not thought much about which was the most gruesome.
35. Sean T. Smith: Hog tied after being shot in the balls, floating in the Everglades, nibbled on by sharks, before bring devoured by an alligator.
36. Lisa Lane: I had a character sew sock puppets into a person's hands, complete with button eyes and yarn hair, then run fishing line through his arms and legs to turn him into a living puppet. He and a few others presumably die of septic shock.
37. Jon Messenger: Heart forcefully ripped from his chest (in a sci-fi book)
38. Kell Frillman: well the basic skull being bashed in ... but in front of their child.
39. Ashleigh Reynolds: Hmmmm probably wood-chipper. Or being torn apart piece by piece.
40. Ken Harrelson: Slow steamed to death
41. Richard Correll: 5 years After: 2.0 The Drumhead The skin had shredded open like wrapping paper on a present. First one pair and then a second burrowed into the red, meaty sustenance. Maggie felt herself start to shiver. Are you cold, sweetheart? She thought she heard her mother say. 
    “No, I don’t feel anything.” She whispered back. 
    The probing, pasty hands burrowed up to the wrist and then the muscles on their arms tensed and pulled. Aaron’s body was off the pavement for a second and then landed back on the cold surface. Aaron’s legs convulsed like a fish out of water.. He can feel what’s happening to him. Maggie’s thought was just a whisper in her ear as she watched. More faces appeared out of the solid forest of limbs to tear in to his skin. The look on their faces was hypnotic, delirious at taking down their prey. Is this what wolves are like? The hands on the back were pulling…. 
    And pulling …….. 
    And pulling…….. 
    Murphy’s voice was a random collection of verbs and syllables that never approached meaning. Maggie watched bloodied skin start to peel back and split in several places at once. It was like the fractures of an ice shelf before it gave way. The tears appeared near other wounds on his skin and began to snake together before the whiteness of his back disappeared in a bath of blood. More hands plunged into the crimson, murky fluid and something of substance appeared to rear itself. As they pulled it away, the ribcage started to bend and snap in spots. Maggie’s mouth slowly parted as a snake like object appeared. 
    The spinal column, inside she felt almost drunk to the world. Come inside, sweety. You look so cold…….. 
42. Pheebz Jackson: Being Flayed alive. in the book Give: An Anthology of Anatomical Entries. It was fun researching the interments they used for this barbaric practice.Not recommended for those with weak constitutions.
43. Ken Harrelson: I turned one into a clown. Not quite dead but somehow worse.
44. Tamara Wilhite: Death by nanites.
45. Kristan L. Cannon: *brain freezes as she recounts the nearly 40 deaths of named characters in the first book alone... and that she's up to four published books in the same series...*
46. Greg Jeffery: Ammunition called a 'singularity round'. It collapses a wad of flesh down to the size of a pinpoint then expands it rapidly, shredding the body.
47. Drew Gideon: Shotgun blast to the head from about two feet away...after having a huge dog rip the back of his legs to shreds.
48. Molly Phipps: I have a particularly gruesome death planned for a character in my next book. So far it's just been neck breakings and getting shot
49. Rebecca Piazza: My main characters mother carved her old companions heart from her chest while she was alive...
50. Stephen Drivick: Fingers bitten off by zombies. Had to be put down by friend.
51. Christopher Artinian: Doused in diesel and set alight, while tied to a chair.
52. RJ Kennett: Tough one. The guy tied down to a bed while a zombie fed on him, or the dog thrown to zombies as a distraction for escape.
53. Craig McDonald: Head partially severed by knife cut, with the coup de grace of the knife embedded in the side of the head.
54. Dawn Peers: Hmm there's a few options. I'm going with "suffocated with an acid-soaked sponge shoved down their throat"
55. [Add your answer here by commenting below! It can be a book your wrote or read.]

​Have you ever hit a wall in your writing? 

I’ve been working on my latest manuscript. I wrote nearly 30k pages in two weeks.

And then it happened. The thing every writer dreads most.

​Writer’s Block.

I sat at my computer and stared at the screen.

I typed a few sentences, then promptly deleted them in disgust.

What happened? I had been full of enthusiasm, excited to get my story on the page.

And then nothing.

This was nearly a month ago. Since then, I’ve managed to pound out nearly 20k additional pages, but I’m not thrilled with it. Instead of anticipating the few stolen moments I get at my computer in my busy schedule, I dread them. 

This is writer’s block. It may take on different forms and arise for different reasons, but every writer has experienced it.

Perhaps you burned out writing too many pages or too many books in a series. Or you are disappointed by your overall experience as a new author. Maybe you can’t relate to your characters, or the plot is stuck and you can’t find a solution.

Whatever the cause, when writer’s block rears its ugly head, we need to find a solution.

Here are 7 ways to cure Writer’s Block:

1) Don’t restrict your writing to time in front of your computer / typewriter / notebook. I’ve found that the best ideas for my book come to me when I’m relaxed, either driving, showering, or taking a walk. Have a notebook handy (or a voice recorder) to take some notes that you can later add into your manuscript. 

Most of my plot solutions, interesting scenes, and character depth comes from times when I’m not trying to think about my book. Even when I’m feeling unmotivated, I find I’ve written several hundred pages worth of ideas in my notebook before I’ve even sat at my computer.

2) Try a writing exercise. I avoided this for a long time. I have such limited time to write in the first place, I didn’t want to waste time writing something that would never appear in a book. But that was a mistake. 

Writing exercises take you back to the basics, forcing you to consider what really matters to a reader: The sensory details of an experience. Readers just want to feel like they are part of your story; to be able to envision the same sunset as your heroine, to feel that water lapping at her feet, to shiver in the cooling evening air. Taste the salt on their lips. The few moments you sacrifice to a writing exercise will pay off, I promise.

3)  Read a good book. What inspired you to write in the first place? The joy you get from a good story, the emotional rush from a drama, the delicious chill from that new horror book you can’t wait to finish? A good book can give you the inspiration you need to turn back to your own book with renewed vigor. The advice I’ve heard is to read as much as you write. 

4)  Don’t be overly critical of yourself. One of my biggest causes of writer’s block is my own self-doubt. I think what I’m writing isn’t good enough, that every other writer is better, and my lack of sales is a result of my own failure as an author… It is easy to get yourself down and become overly-critical of your writing. Just get your thoughts out there. You can refine them later. And any author willing to accept constructive criticism and find a decent editor can have a great book. No one writers a bestseller in the first sitting. It takes time, practice, and lots of editing to get to that point. And possibly years of efforts…

5) Exercise. I love to take walks. Being outdoors is inspiring enough, but combining fresh air and exercises really gets my mind working. By exercising, you are getting extra oxygen pumping and releasing endorphins. This combination will help you feel better overall, which will go a long way in combating negative emotions or physical ailments that might keep you from writing.

6) Listen to music. Music speaks to us; listening to music that is meaningful, evocative, or just has a great beat will inspire ideas. I enjoy creating a playlist, which I call my soundtrack, for each book. When I put on my “book soundtrack”, it immediately puts me into the mood I need to begin writing. The playlist for my first book, Reaper, included artists like Bastille, Of Monsters and Men, Avicii, One Republic, and Imagine Dragons. The right music can speak to your soul and get the creative juices flowing.

7)  Never give up. Even if you don’t feel like writing, sit down and do it. Every day, if you can. Get up half an hour earlier or stay up a little later and get a paragraph written. The worst thing you can do is to stop writing. While taking a brief break (a week or so) away from a book can help (and spend that extra time doing writing prompts, reading a good book, or exercising), don’t stay away too long.

Share your techniques for combating writer’s block, or favorite writing prompts. I’d love to try them!

I want to take a minute to tell you about a project I am involved in through the company I work for in my "real" life. You know, that real job that many of us authors and freelancers work to pay the bills. I'm fortunate enough to have a job I love, as a VP for a digital marketing technology company. 

Let me tell you a short story:


Once Upon a Time…
There was a group of passionate readers that saw the need for independent authors to better promote their books. They set to work crafting technology that would help every author reach their audience.

FranticFroggy.com was born.

Who is FranticFroggy?

The world of publishing is changing at an amazing rate. Where authors would once struggle for years to get a manuscript published, they can now successfully do on their own. The struggle now for emerging authors is, once published, how do you promote your book?

That is where FranticFroggy comes in. We've created a tool specifically for authors to use the latest digital marketing trends to promote their books. FranticFroggy.com is the digital marketing destination for any author looking for a better way, an easier way, to promote their own books.


What exactly are digital marketing tools?

Digital marketing tools include:

A personal homepage for your author brand so you are accessible to your audience. This include a contact form to help build your subscriber list!

Where can you manage all those contacts? A Contact Manager (CRM), of course! Anyone on your mailing list or blog will automatically be entered. You can also add any contacts you make at book signings or book trade shows. It makes it really easy to keep track of these contacts, and add them to your email lists. 

Let’s talk about EMAIL. Email marketing is one of the BEST ways to reach an audience for the most affordable price. FranticFroggy includes automated emails as well as the ability to send mass emails to your mailing lists. You can easily manage, sort, and segment your email list to make the most of this marketing medium.

Web pages and direct sales. Landing pages are web pages designed specifically to sell or promote ONE thing. In this case, it would be a book. Retailers the world over use these direct sale pages to successfully run marketing campaigns and sell their products or services. Authors can harness the power of direct marketing with pre-made landing pages, as well as the ability to create custom pages.

Content Marketing. Content is still king. If you've been around any digital marketers lately, you've probably heard of content marketing. It is the most popular marketing technique currently, and NATURALLY FranticFroggy includes content marketing features. A blog is probably the most well-known content marketing tool you’ll get with FranticFroggy, but it isn't the only one!


Success Education. The biggest barrier for many authors in promoting their book is KNOWLEDGE. Authors are busy people, and they may not be marketing pros. That is ok! FranticFroggy includes a complete education system with video and text tutorials and lessons to help authors succeed throughout every stage of writing, editing, publishing, and promoting their book.


Why do we care so much about authors?

We are a technology company, but we are made up of more than just computer scientists and marketers. We are avid readers and former publishing professionals, as well as parents, that are dedicated to importance of READING and BOOKS in shaping and changing the world. Did you know that children who are read to, and read while growing up, perform better in school? Did you know that ADULTS who read often are more open-minded, more empathetic, and are quicker to embrace creative ideas?

Independent authors are full of new, creative concepts. We want to give these world-changing ideas that chance they deserve to reach a broad audience. We don’t want any great author to struggle to reach their audience because they aren't a great promoter. That is why we are building FranticFroggy.

FranticFroggy is a passion project for my company. We care so much about reading, and helping independent authors succeed, that we've begun working on this platform for authors. As self-publishing takes over the book industry, we see a great need for services like ours. 

Because we care so much about reading, we donate all the profits from the book we published with Amy Frazier, Frantic Froggy, to organizations promoting reading and literacy.

Tell me what you think about reading, indie authors, or anything else!

I love to talk to other writers and learn how each has different and fascinating writing techniques. Here is a great infographic on the top writing tools of famous authors. If you like typewriters and fountain pens, you're in good company...

Also, this graphic was originally posted on Nicholas C. Rossis' blog. If you haven't before, or even if you have, check out his award-winning blog. He has some really fantastic content for writers and readers!

What are you favorite writing tools? Share them in the comments!

I'm so thrilled to be publishing my author website. I've written numerous blogs over the years in my role as a digital marketer and editor. Becoming an author is a new and exciting challenge! I am looking forward to connecting with other independent authors.

Through my editing and marketing work with authors, I've found that they are an amazing group of people. So passionate, committed, and willing to help other authors succeed. I cannot wait to become part of this group of individuals that are changing the world, one book at a time!