Yesterday, 5AM or so, about 1600 words into a chapter, I had to kill a character which I very much like. This almost can’t happen to me when writing a short story. If someone has to die I know it in advance – no matter what the length is – but when the story is short I don’t get attached to the character. However, when it’s a longer work, you actually get to play around with the character, let it do stuff, piss people off, befriend other people, have a life. Killing it – especially this particular character – turned out to be a real mess. And it didn’t help that the whole thing also had to be funny.