Guest blog on the concept behind "Killing Max," a short story by S. Wolf
My short story Killing Max arose from the popular concept of going back in time to kill Hitler before he rose to power. I wanted to write the story from Hitler's point of view, where these random people are showing up trying to kill him, but something always happens to save his life. I decided there was too much baggage with Hitler, so I created a new character, Maxwell Madison, who is a teenager in 2010, but will grow up to be the worse dictator the world has ever seen. I always thought of it as a short story, but when I presented it to my writing group, they suggested it could be made into a novel. Perhaps sometime in the future I'll expand it. But the way the book is structured now, it works better as a short story because the fact that he's a future dictator is kept secret from the reader, which creates a mystery as to why these things are happening to him. This actually makes the book hard to market, because I can't tell potential reader...