Kendra here: Please welcome thriller author Andrew Kaufman to the blog today! And his dog, Caleb.

The tattooed, bad boy biker.

The sexy, iconic rock star.

The brooding detective with a tortured soul who always finds the killer.

Let’s face it, those characters are likeable and appealing, and they’ll always sell. It’s why we see them every day on TV, read about them in novels. If I’m going to be completely honest, I may or may not have even fantasized a time or two about being a few of them. Maybe even pondered the idea of changing my name to Chance, Shane, or Luke.

But those characters have never felt very real to me; in fact, other than their tough exteriors and chiseled jawlines, there’s not much else I remember about them.

When I sat down to create Patrick, the protagonist in my bestselling psychological thriller, The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted (and its newly released sequel, Darkness & Shadows), I was hoping to break the hero mold. I didn’t necessarily want perfect—I wanted perfectly flawed.  I wanted a hero who was not your everyday hero.

Kendra here: Roberta connected with me on Facebook after realizing we shared an agent and had sold to the same publisher. Now we chat frequently about all things writing.

“Everything happens somewhere.” – Pieter Haag

Every writer knows the basic elements of story – plot, character, and setting. Writers spend endless hours strategizing, building timelines, and staging action to create a dramatic scaffold. We carefully layer in intrigue, suspense, and crises to challenge characters we have lovingly shaped and sculpted into multi-dimensional beings that breathe and bleed on the page.  We take great care to shade and nuance our protagonists and antagonists, giving them the depth and substance they need to bear the weight of the story we have constructed around them, and endow them with strength and frailty and the power to change. And all of this is staged in a world within a world – one we hope our readers will never want to leave.