I got to thinking about how Atom and Go seem to bounce from one scrape to the next with very little downtime in between. This follows the general adventure fiction, but seems to be a tad out of touch with reality.

I laughed at that thought.

Authors don’t write fiction because they want to imitate reality, we want to capture snippets of life and interject them into our stories with flair.

Can you imagine who would read a story if it followed everyday life?

Even the most adventurous life tends to have a lot of downtime. To put that in perspective … a military sniper may only take 10-20 shots in their entire career. That can boil down to sitting around, watching and waiting for an entire month just for a single breath of action. Counting the calls to the average fire department, only about 5% are actual fires. Everything else is routine checks. Even a skydive instructor has loads of downtime. They sit around for hours of their day for a few minutes of adrenaline rush.

People don’t want to read that.

Can you imagine if the audience was gifted with hours of watching Jack Reacher sit and drink coffee while he waited for action?

For me, one of the big things is the characters Atom and Go stumble across. Most of them are pretty interesting. Statistically speaking, they shouldn’t be meeting this many interesting people. But hey, it’s fiction. Interesting is better.

Nothing happens in the story if they just hang out with a painter or school teacher all day … although students might listen a little better if Atom was sitting in the back of the classroom.

Bottom line, Atom leads a charmed and exciting life. I’m guessing most of us couldn’t handle anything that fast paced. We sure do like to read about it. If people didn’t like fast paced novels, authors like Lee Childs and Jim Butcher would be out of a job.

While I work to figure out how Atom and Go will get out of their next scrape, I want to challenge you to keep on reading, keep on creating, and keep on flying the Black.