I got my characters talking.

I wrote Chapter 7 earlier this week, sometime over the weekend.

Chapter 7 came to 2,380 words (bringing the book’s total to 16,548 words), and most of what happened in it is dialogue.

I’m not sure how happy I am with it. I wasn’t feeling very good about it when I wrote it, and then when I read it back I was a lot happier with it. (Maybe I was feeling awkward during the drafting because it was a pretty awkward conversation.) I’m trying to build a rapport here but my character is resisting it, and I kinda need her to stop doing that if I am going to get anywhere, but that’s what she wants to do so I can’t really write her out of character.

She kinda makes a good point during this whole thing, too: she’s actually not a very nice person, but she’s not actively mean either. It’s just that when you don’t really want to engage, speak bluntly and sparingly, and aren’t empathetic–and (this is key) you’re female–this behavior is interpreted as rude. Women and girls not going out of their way to coddle and comfort others–especially if they’re boys or men who want their attention–are perceived as bitchy. I’m kind of fighting that feeling with Megan, because she’s honestly not “a bitch.” She just lives in a world that expects things of ladies that she is not interested in providing, and she refuses to apologize for it, but she’s not making a big platform out of how proud she is to not apologize for it either.

But anyway, I got my characters talking, I got Brady and Megan to reach an understanding (even if she was kind of sour about it), and I got him to buy her a cookie, so there’s that.

Let’s see where they take it from here.

Well I finished Chapter 6, and had aspirations of writing another one, but I just didn’t get around to it, because slacker.

I mentioned a few weeks back that I started writing Chapter 6, and that I got an imaginary cityscape scene and a family interaction scene out. I went ahead and completed a school scene too, which included something big for Megan’s classmate Brady. And, as usual, my jaded protagonist is sulking about it.

Chapter 6 is 2,031 words, bringing the book’s total to 14,161 so far.

Here’s a thing: I’ve been using the f-word.

It hasn’t been thrown around aggressively; it’s only popped up a few times, and I didn’t save it for powerful scenes. I just remember what high school was like, and we said some raunchy stuff. (And that didn’t really change in adulthood, but I’m saying. The f-word is common in many high schools. I remember hearing it all the time even in middle school.) This is contemporary YA and the school setting is probably pretty typical. I think it makes sense that the characters would occasionally throw out curse words, even the f-bomb. But she uses it casually, not as a shortcut to showing she’s the “angry youth” type, you know? Megan doesn’t talk much, so she tends to make sure the words she does say have an impact. And one of the ways she gets an impact is using strong language.

I wonder how I’m going to handle the next few chapters. I don’t want her to suddenly become chatty, but I do need her to have some conversations with Brady. I will probably handle it with a mixture of three techniques: Having her open up unexpectedly sometimes, having her say little but add onto her comments with attached thoughts, and having Brady sort of lampshade her tight-lipped nature by bothering her to say more (which she will either refuse to do or claim she’ll tell him when she wants to). It’s a battle to get words out of Megan when you’re talking to her, but she speaks just enough that it’s not like it’s shocking if she talks (like, you know, a Silent Bob type). I don’t want it to seem like she has some kind of silence vow going on. She just doesn’t really want to talk to you. It’s not awkwardness (well, not exactly), it’s not abject rudeness, it’s not shyness; she just . . . legit doesn’t have a lot to say to you and doesn’t want your attention, so why should she?

I’ve never written a character quite like this before and I’m enjoying the departure.

I forget how much stuff I got written this week, but it did what I wanted it to do.

So I’m gonna talk about cityscape scenes.

My character does this thing–so far only on Page 1 of every even chapter–where she views an imaginary city, and it later becomes one of her drawings. She interacts with these cityscape scenes in a very peculiar way: mostly she’s just an observer, but she does act upon the environment without it being clear that “she” is actually there, and these scenes are written in present tense with a detached narrator. (There’s never any “I” in them.) My character has opinions about these city environments and her thoughts translate into drawings later, but what’s also interesting is that she’ll incorporate things she wants to be there into her drawings and if she goes back to those imaginary cities those things are there. It’s like the imaginary cities can contribute to her real life, and her real life can contribute to her cities.

It’s really, really interesting to write. It’s a little bit like Finding Mulligan, which is my book about a girl who lives one life when she’s awake and a different one when she’s asleep (but she believes she is two different people in those different places).

In the latest chapter opening, I gave her a weird clean slate (after two other chapters established what she usually looks at in imaginary cityscapes). I’m going to spend the next few even-chapter openings cluttering this place up while she’s experimenting with her art. (This is kind of spawned by her teacher telling her she needs more than one kind of piece in her portfolio if she’s going to apply to art school, so she’s kind of in panic mode looking for a way to translate her usual art-making techniques into different products. It’s going to end in mixed results.)

This week’s partial chapter included a page of that stuff and then some more family dynamics featuring Megan hanging out with Dyane and Dyane’s boyfriend Corey. I’m not done with the chapter though. I want to do another school scene with Brady. It’s Chapter 6 already. This important relationship needs to get rolling.

Eh so that’s it for now.

My character is Not Me. She’s more divergent from being Me than most of my characters–not just in life circumstances (because all my characters have very different life circumstances from me), but in the way she speaks and thinks and IS. And because of that, I actually have to work really hard to stop my own inclinations from elbowing their way in when the flow clatters a little bit and I’m trying to keep going.

I have this wordiness problem, as y’all well know, and though it’s gotten a LOT better in recent years, I still have a tendency to wordify things. That includes feelings and thoughts and reactions and attempts to include other people. And I’m kinda used to having introspective, self-aware characters who revel in those words, composing significant dialogue and having a fair amount of running commentary in their heads.

That’s not what Megan is like. It’s kinda frustrating.

Nearly every time I write a full sentence for her I feel like it’s too much. She doesn’t talk a lot, and when she does talk, it’s usually pretty guarded. She doesn’t take extra steps to invite people to understand her; she doesn’t explain her thoughts; she doesn’t even fixate on what she’s thinking enough for me to nail it down in the text. I’m not used to a character like her who mostly speaks because others speak to her or because she can’t avoid it or to get them to STOP talking to her. (And I think this is going to make the times Megan DOES speak for other reasons far more significant, which will make my job easier down the line.)

It’s turning out to be pretty hard working with someone whose communication style is so different from mine. And I don’t want to just write it how I would write it and then edit it to be more like her because that will fundamentally change how I think about her. I’ll only really nail her voice if I practice with it as it’s developing in the story.

It’s pretty funny that I’m finally writing an asexual character and she’s the least like me of any character I’ve had. (We do seem to share an opinion when it comes to kissing, though.) I wonder how many of my readers are going to relate to her?

I’m kinda amazed that I’m still not making time for more than one chapter a week right now. Well maybe a better word is “disappointed.”

The good news is that this is probably my favorite chapter so far. Chapter 5 is about protagonist Megan interacting with Brady in homeroom and finding out some stuff about him that suggests he is not the jerk she has always thought he was (though she’s still wondering if he’s a liar). I did kinda feel like she said too many words in the chapter though. She’s pretty reserved and usually quite reluctant to say anything at all, and I think I could pull back on some of her dialogue since this has to be a new record for her.

And there’s also been a bomb dropped on her about diversifying her portfolio so now she’s dealing with that too. Hopefully I’ll get it strung together soon enough.

Chapter 5 was 2,540 words and brings the book’s total to about 12,000 words.

I think I need to bring Megan’s sister back for Chapter 6 and build on some of her home life stuff because that’s going to be important. I don’t want to linger there too much though because I want to get her back to school and throw Brady at her again. That’ll be fun because I’ve kind of written that part already, back when I first wrote about these characters in 1999.

It’s much slower going over here than I thought it was going to be. I think I’m okay with that, though.

I’m not having a problem writing this. I’m just not deciding to sit down and write often enough. I should probably do something about that, but at the same time, I know it’s not a race. It’s not like I’m doing NaNoWriMo. It’s not like I’m trying to write like the wind to impress anyone. So I think I like balancing the writing of this novel with all the other things I’m continuing to do (consistently update two webcomics and two YouTube channels, write for my four blogs, read a book a week, make creative things, and see people I care about).

I did not use my time wisely over the four-day weekend attached to Thanksgiving, sadly. I wrote ONE chapter over the weekend and that was it. I’m happy with the chapter.

Chapter 4 is only about 1700 words, and it’s mostly about Megan in art class. I don’t know about the pacing here. It seems like she’s now spent three of the four chapters waffling about whether she’s going to apply for a scholarship. Not exactly thrilling material here folks. I do want it to be established how much inertia is actually acting on her to keep her from making that leap, but maybe I don’t need this much. At least the chapter did an okay job giving us the mini-culture of her classroom and inserting another conversation with her art teacher. (And it continued the pattern I’ve established where the even-numbered chapters open with one of Megan’s specialized lucid dreams–a pattern I intend to break when I start breaking all the other patterns in her life.)

The book overall is about to hit 10,000 words. The next chapter will revisit the character Brady. I’m anxious to get his plot moving.

I thought I was going to get a lot of writing done this week, but then things happened.

The new word count is 7,976, with Chapter 3 weighing in at 2,545 words.

In it, I have introduced the not-useless guidance counselor–his name is Mr. Navarro–and I’ve gotten Megan moving with her motivation to consider going to college. We also got to meet her classmate Brady, who’s pretty damn important in the book.

I’m not sure how exactly that development is going to look in the context of the story though. Megan is clearly irritated by Brady’s very existence, and all her mental narration casts him as a total asshole, but his actions in the chapter aren’t at all asshole material. I want this to suggest some layers of resentment and frustration for her that she’s not really willing to acknowledge consciously, but I worry that readers will oversimplify and think she’s just being a jerk. Guess we’ll see. All I can do is put stuff there. I can’t control what people do with it. I’ll figure out later what level of nuance I need to use.

Also, I’m really not a settings person–I tend to describe conversation and interaction and mental experiences but not so much the world around people. I’m working really hard against my inclinations for this story because I feel like the protagonist would look at her environment a lot more than I do. I want her to filter the world around her through at least something like an artist’s eye–which is not to say she romanticizes anything, but she does notice stuff. There should be a lot of details of the surroundings blended into her experiences. I hope it won’t look shoehorned in since it’s not my strength.

That’s it for now!

Finished writing the second chapter of the book I started at the beginning of this month. It’s not going too quickly. Not sure why. I have time to work on it right now; just haven’t really felt like it (except for the times I did feel like it and did so).

The new chapter is only 1,750 words long, bringing the manuscript to 5,429 words now. You get to see the inspiration for Megan’s drawings (though I don’t make that 100% clear until I guess the end of the chapter), and you get to meet her sister, Dyane.

I’m not sure what I think about her. She’s not quite what I expected, though that’s pretty common for me when I think up characters and then write them down. I’m a little worried that she’ll come across like a stereotype.

An earlier book of mine, Finding Mulligan, is New Adult but I entered it as YA in a contest once. One of the judges praised me for actually having a YA heroine whose family life isn’t horrible. “The parents are married and aren’t at each other’s throats and nobody’s experiencing abuse! Bravo!” So I guess it’s kind of become a cliché that our YA leads are coming from broken or dysfunctional homes. I’m a little worried about that because not only does Megan live with neither parent–she lives with her older sister in a dubiously legal situation–but the sister is clearly not a competent guardian.

Which I think is realistic given her sister is only twenty-four, and it’s not like Megan is much younger. (She’s eighteen, so she doesn’t technically need a legal guardian, but before she turned eighteen, her sister was acting as her guardian.) I don’t want the story to be too stereotypical and rely on broken-family tropes to manufacture problems. The focus of this book isn’t honestly on Megan’s home life, but I’m sure it will figure in, because it has to.

I initially conceived Dyane as sort of emotionally abusive in her interaction with Megan, but as I thought about it more, I wanted them to have a much more complicated relationship, where Dyane isn’t exactly happy that she’s had so little time to be a child but she loves her sister and watches out for her in weird, sometimes misguided, sporadic ways. I wanted there to be some clear love there even if her sister’s very immature.

I think the sisters’ interaction came out pretty good though. Megan’s clearly executing a practiced series of actions while dealing with her sister, which suggests her emotional state coming home at 3 AM is not uncommon at all, and Megan makes concessions for her sister that she doesn’t for others. I’m just not sure if this is a good place for this interaction yet, though. I’ll figure out how to arrange these chapters later, I’m sure, and I did want to get Dyane on the page as soon as I could, but now that it’s written, it kind of feels like a lull and I worry about whether it will mess with the pacing.

I have to send Megan to school in Chapter 3 so wish me luck.