Today I un-killed one of my characters. His name is Joe and he’s pretty minor as characters go, but now he is un-dead. (Not one of the undead; just not dead.)
The world I’m building, in a fictional town in Virginia, is currently still under my control. In the real world, real kids are being shot and a click of the keyboard is not going to revive them. Select/delete will not erase a funeral.
As authors, we reflect real life, even in fantasy. Which means that often, we do write about death. People die. People grieve. A death in a story shows what it takes for other characters to rise up and endure. So there may be times when I have to kill a character, let the cancer invade more cells, let the car hit the cat, let the bullet find a target.
But not this week dammit.
Not this week.