The next thing I knew, and even though I had never before or since written a substantial amount of a story in longhand, I started writing the story of Odd Thomas in longhand. I lead an unusual life.' And I turned around to a legal tablet that I keep beside me and wrote the lines down. I was working on another novel, and into my mind came the words, 'My name is Odd Thomas. I felt like a swine.'Ī: He just came into my head completely full-blown.

I said in a tweet at some point, 'Finishing him off was like stabbing an old friend in the back.

People who work in the house with us would go by my door and probably thought I deserved to be in an institution, and maybe I do. Other times, I was sitting here in tears. I got so close to him that when he said something funny, I'd laugh out loud as if I was hearing him say it. Were there times when you looked forward to moving on from Odd Thomas?Ī: I liked him so much that I would have been content to write more about him, but you also come to a moment where you realize, 'What is there more to be said about him?' But it was never weariness. Q: Some writers eventually grow weary of their series characters, as Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie famously did with Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. I thought, 'I can't keep him going forever, no matter how interesting he is.' (Laughs.) In the first book, he lost the love of his life, and got a little card from a fortune-telling machine that said, 'You are destined to be together forever.' And I knew that was a promise that had to be fulfilled. In book two, I thought, 'He's on a journey to absolute humility,' which I didn't know how I was going to write about since I don't have an experience of absolute humility myself. But the character just had dimension after dimension that I found fascinating. Q: Is the ending of the Odd Thomas series a sad occasion for you?Ī: When I finished the first one, Odd Thomas, I thought, 'This is liable to be more than one book,' but at most I thought it would be a trilogy.

Odd thomas by dean koontz