This is K.M. Island and you are listening to the 489th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast.

This week, it's finally my pleasure to announce to all of you who have been waiting for it for a really long time that the audiobook version of my portal fantasy Dreamlander is now available narrated by CJ McAllister.

To date I've produced audio versions of all my non-fiction writing craft books.

But this is my first foray into audio for my fiction.

It's something a lot of readers have been asking for over the years, so I'm excited to finally be able to offer it.

You can grab it off Amazon, and if you're not an audible member yet, you can even grab it for free by signing up. You can find links on my

site if you're interested by visiting helping writers become authors.com. And now I hope you

enjoyed this week's podcast,

supporting characters and theme.

Six important questions to ask about your story.

Raise your hand if you've ever written in a new supporting character just because, hey, somebody had to start that tavern brawl.

Creating delightfully colorful, unexpected, and sometimes just plain convenient minor characters

is half the fun of writing.

That said, we might all want to now sit on those hands we raised. However random our supporting cast may sometimes seem,

writers mustn't overlook the crucial correlation between supporting characters and theme. In short, the more important

your supporting characters, the greater your responsibility to ensure they

contribute more than just that first punch to get the conflict going.

Once you've properly set up the foundations of your story's thematic presentation via your protagonist's arc and your

antagonist's generation of the plot conflict, your supporting characters are

going to provide your greatest opportunity for deepening the complexity, maturity, and

subliminal power of your story's thematic premise. Now I'm going to repeat an analogy I've used before because it's one of my favorite ways to view theme and that is think of your overall theme as a big mirror smashed on the floor. The biggest chunk of glass is your

protagonist. The second biggest is your antagonist and every other shard represents every other character.

...