21

No. Not the game of blackjack. The answer to an indignant question posed by my fifteen year old daughter.

Quite a few years ago, my daughter began showing a talent for writing. But story after story, a trend emerged, and the tales she wrote dealt with mythical creatures or hybrid animals. The more she wrote, the more complex the weird characters got. But no matter how much we tried to cajole her,  she absolutely would not write about human beings. 

She created stories about unicorns and weird flying horse-looking thingy's. Her drawing talents allowed her to even illustrate the stories with characters that can only be described as weird and bizarre. Finally, she began to settle in on characters she created that were modeled after cats. They became the basis of her first self published book, 'A Heart's Journey'.  

But there was another disturbing, yet consistent trend to her work. She developed the habit of killing off many of her featured characters.

Sometimes, it was the main characters. Other times,  just a few of the minor ones. I  noticed. I commented. She glared. I became worried she was packing a concealed weapon so I didn't push the issue. Mostly I chalk it all up to a writing phase she's going through and will emerge from eventually.

So the family, including my father-in-law, is sitting around the dinner table on a Friday night shortly after I published 'Hidden Legacy'. Friday is the one night each week we can actually sit, and have a family dinner. Well, that's not totally, 100% true. We try to eat together every evening and manage to do so more times than not, as long as my wife isn't working till all hours as an O/R nurse. But Friday night dinners are special and this particular Friday, conversation drifted to my daughter's attempts at starting a new book. She was lamenting how hard it was to get warm to this next set of characters, to which I cracked smart that it shouldn't be much of a concern. 'After all', I said, 'most of them will probably be dead by chapter three.' To which my daughter just  sneered. 'Oh really dad. Well, how many people did YOU kill in YOUR story?' The answer was, I didn't really know. I hadn't counted. And so I began.

When I finished, I was mortified. The count was 21. And I really wasn't 100% certain it would stop there. I had the sinking feeling I was forgetting a body or two. But 21 dead.  Needless to say, my daughter smiled that evil smile teenagers inherit as they grow out of their young teen years and the conversation subject changed quickly.

I didn't mean to. Really. It's just hard to escape reverse heredity.