Death By Coconut.

A.D. Starrling

Welcome A.D. Starrling. You gotta love a physician who writes paranormal romantic fiction…

DEATH BY COCONUT

I bet some of you are thinking, ‘She had a massive allergic reaction to coconut or something…’ I wish that were true…on second thought, maybe not.

So there I was, sitting under a tree on the beach in my holiday resort in the Dominican Republic. This was January 2012. A few feet away, my friend was sizzling gently on a sun bed; little did she know she was going to have some major burn marks by the end of the day. She’s a general practitioner; she should know better. Having had enough of the heat, I was cooling off in the shade while doing some good old writing on the laptop; my earphones were in and I was bobbing gently along to Keisha’s Animal & Cannibal. Great holiday soundtracks by the way.

Then it happened. BAM! A coconut landed about three feet from me. It was larger than my head and left an impact crater on the ground. After recovering from my mini heart attack, I got the hell out of there, and went to the bar for a stiff Pina Colada. But it got me thinking. Not the Pina Colada. Although I do come up with some funny ideas after I’ve had a few of those. I meant the coconut.

What if my writing career had ended there and then? What if that coconut had landed on my head and snuffed me? What would the newspaper headlines have said? ‘Author killed by Cocos nucifera’? ‘Revenge of the coconut palm’? ‘Her last words were “Aaarrghh!”’?

This got me thinking some more. I don’t want anyone reading this to take offense and I apologise in advance if it does, but what are the most stupid ways in which people have met their end? I looked it up and found some doozies.

475 BCE: Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, died after treating his dropsy (that’s oedema to you and me) by wrapping himself in cow manure and baking himself in the sun in the hope this would draw out the fluid in his body. Modern body wraps anyone?

430 BCE: Empedocles, a Greek philosopher who believed in reincarnation, apparently died after throwing himself into a volcano to prove to his disciples that he was immortal and would be reborn as a God among men after being consumed by fire. There’s a large underwater volcano off the south coast of Sicily named after him. No really, there is.

1601: Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer and alchemist, died from urinary retention and uraemia after refusing to leave the dinner table to relieve himself when he was attending a banquet. It would have been seen as a breach of etiquette, you see. Etiquette be damned I say! When a girl’s gotta pee, she’s gotta pee!

1626: Francis Bacon, English philosopher and scientist among other things, died of pneumonia after trying to find out whether freezing temperatures could preserve meat. He did this by stuffing a fowl with snow. Think of that when you’re looking at that chicken in your freezer tonight.

1751: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, a French physician and author of ‘L’Homme Machine’, died after eating too much pheasant pâté with truffles at a feast held in his honour by the man he had just cured. Now that’s a major case of indigestion.

So there you are folks! Let us know if you come up with anything else. Alternatively, have any of you read books where a character died in a stupid way or are you an author who has killed off a character while sniggering about it?

Happy reading and writing all! Oh and look out for those coconuts.

AD Starrling

Soul Meaning by A.D. Starrling.

‘My name is Lucas Soul. Today, I died again. This is my fifteenth death in the last four hundred and fifty years.’

The Crovirs and the Bastians. Two races of immortals who have lived side by side with humans for millennia and been engaged in a bloody war since the very dawn of their existence. With the capacity to survive up to sixteen deaths, it was not until the late fourteenth century that they reached an uneasy truce, following a deadly plague that wiped out more than half of their numbers and made the majority of survivors infertile.

Soul is an outcast of both immortal societies. Born of a Bastian mother and a Crovir father, a half breed whose very existence is abhorred by the two races, he spends the first three hundred and fifty years of his life being chased and killed by the Hunters.

One fall night in Boston, the Hunt starts again, resulting in Soul’s fifteenth death and triggering a chain of events that sends him on the run with Reid Hasley, a former US Marine and his human business partner of ten years. When a lead takes them to Washington DC and a biotechnology company with affiliations to the Crovirs, they cross the Atlantic to Europe, on the trail of a French scientist whose research seems intrinsically linked to the reason why the Hunters are after Soul again.

From Paris to Prague, their search for answers will lead them deep into the immortal societies and bring them face to face with someone from Soul’s past. Shocking secrets are uncovered and fresh allies come to the fore as they attempt to put a stop to a new and terrifying threat to both immortals and humans.

Time is running out for Soul. Can he get to the truth before his seventeenth death, protect the ones he loves and prevent another immortal war?

You can find Soul Meaning on Amazon and Smashwords and the author here:

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