About Sonny Kohet

I don’t think the course altered my writing style, but it inspired me to keep writing because I found the creative process, creating a world, and a life that people, and ensemble of characters existed within to be fascinating.

As to what turned the book into a series, basically I finished the first book, and wasn’t done. I found the story continuing into a second book.

I later did another course through Coursera, and I needed to write another book to fit the parameters of the course. That was the third book, at least I thought it was, but it became the fourth book as I wrote another to fit between the second and third books.

In many ways, the books wrote themselves, with characters often taking themselves in directions I didn’t intend. Minor characters sometimes became major characters.

It was when I joined editing groups such as Scripophile and Critique Circle that my writing style improved and moved from business style writing to novel style writing.

Judy is a composite of three people. All of my characters are based on a person I have met during my life. Sometimes they are composites, sometimes I have based two characters on one person. And sometimes they are directly based on a single person.

Working in remote, island, and foreign settings tends to attract a lot of misfits who don’t quite fit into society for various reasons. When living in a third world country, people, on medication to stabilize them, tend to self-medicate in the absence of consistent medical care, with interesting and sometimes disastrous results. Barely functional alcoholics live on a diet of cheap and nasty booze.

I was working security in one resort, when two of the staff who’d been incarcerated at one time in their lives came to blows over who’d done the harder time.

It began as part of an exercise to describe somewhere a writer might find inspirational to work, and a second exercise to describe a person. So, she sat in a café and described a man she saw out the window, and then he dies of natural causes.

I didn’t want to follow standard plots and themes, which is why he wasn’t murdered. I am making a statement about the world, where no one is essentially a bad person, no good versus evil, just ordinary people. I tried to maintain interest by having her peel the layers of his character back like an onion, changing her opinion of him as she did.

Everything we read or watch these days, TV, Movies, Books, and News is focused on negatives. On people being selfish or with evil motives. This exists, but when we focus on the negative, it’s what the world becomes.

My characters are good people, as all people basically are. Some of whom have made mistakes in their lives, but it is about people breaking free from their past and building a positive and productive life for themselves.

All of my characters and their natures are based on real people, or real genders doing real things. Some people have difficulty accepting the reality of people’s actions if such actions are outside of their reality.

For example, in one book I have a woman who fantasizes about raping another woman. Some people have an issue with this because ‘women don’t rape.’ But a former girlfriend of mine was raped by a woman. This is different that being raped by a man, but it is still rape.