Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

Learning Curves came out two years after IHG, and while A Flawed Diamond has that Hollywood party where Randi is accosted by some assholes, it was not my inspiration. The oldest files on my computer with that title are from early 2013 before Jay started posting A Flawed Diamond, which I did not read until two years later. I had not liked The Outsider, and I hesitated starting to read the sequel.
The villain, Don Brentano, was already an indirect character in Her Apple Pie, posted in 2013, and in development from 2010 onwards.
Nope, I claim this as an original story idea, growing out of the earlier Clearwater stories.

Are we talking about the same story here?

My post was general in nature, not targeted at a specific story.

If you missed it - my passage about communication between living and dead characters was about what happens in our real world making a story seem phony.

Many authors are very intelligent and aware of what is happening in the world around them. They extrapolate based on their observations to project what may happen in the future and then use the results in their stories.

Personally, I don't consider an extrapolation of what may happen to be a prediction. To me, a prediction is someone saying something will happen in the future.

I tend to agree with your comments about epilogues or other end-of-story techniques.

However :) I'm writing a do-over. My MC is quite aware of what happened after his (first) death, because that's 99.99999% of the story. There's nothing in the way of him potentially knowing what happens after another death, given that we've already canonically established that death is not 'the end', at least in some cases.

Doesn't mean I'm going to do that, and - at my current writing pace - I will probably have to be writing from the grave to get to my MC's death, but the pace may pick up in later books.

There are entire first-person stories narrated by dead people out there. It can be done. You just have to postulate that life after death is possible and there's some way for a ghostly narrator to convey their story to the living.

there's some way for a ghostly narrator to convey their story to the living.

I have no problem with a ghostly narrator.

In the story I was thinking about, when I wrote my earlier post, the dialog was presented as if the character was still alive. There had been no groundwork done to support the concept of a ghostly narrator or for the deceased character presenting the after-death narration and dialog.

The author handled the character as if they had never died.