'Conflict creates character; crisis defines it.' - - Steven V. Thulon
Conflict can involve two irreconcilable thoughts or ideas, colliding emotions that gnaw at each other, a fly swatter and a fly, a plane and an empty gas gauge, a dog searching for his buried bone, a bad-hair-day, a nasty E-mail, faulty wiring, a doll floating into shore, or a shadow on the ceiling of your bedroom.
the opening from EXPATRIATE BONES:
In six hours she would be dead. She would meet her murderer and understand why he needed to kill her. If Christine Duma had known this would happen, she would have done things differently. She would have left housekeeping at L' Hotel Plateau, and after, she wouldn't have babysat her nephew Stephen or worried about her anatomy lab at McGill the next day. She had no warning that later in the raw, Montreal night, the blond-haired, hotel guest would return to his room to claim what was missing, track it down and kill for it.
Try this - expand on the following:
The kid was hostile. Took pleasure in scraping bone from an extinct skull. He liked to muscle the air and drive rain back into clouds.
