I'm here today with another main character from my WIP, Believe It. Dani is a shamelessly brash young woman with a secret love for ... well ... let's find out, shall we?

( Join the studio audience! )

Well, Jack and I have brought our interview to a close, and he dropped some tantalizing hints. Click through the cut to take a look.

( Part Two )

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That's all for now, folks!

Okay. Can I just say right now that I LOVE UNIVERSITY!

Where else does a married couple from the Middle Ages burst in, mid-lecture?

(No joke. I nearly fell off the couch when it happened on the video.)

My lecturer is clear and personable, and so I have time to write down what I need to and somehow I knew when it was time to put the pen down and just listen.

First day of class: Success.

Item #2: I have been having so much fun making icons for the characters of my newest WIP.

When I'm writing a story, my characters are what (who?) get me through the rough patches (and your unfailing support!). So it's important that, upon starting a new project, I know them well.

Okay. Back up a second. I should tell you that that last sentence, right there, is hogwash. Okay, maybe not hogwash, but it's educated guesswork. I really have no idea if it's true or not. I just feel that it is. I have the entire book outlined. I know what I need to research. I've met these characters before (and yet, they're strangers to me).

I could not put a word to the page. Nothing felt right.

So, it's back to basics. My basics. Tonight, down at the pier, I drank hot chocolate and interviewed Jack, one of the main characters of Believe It. If you're interested, click through.

( Part one )

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That's it for now, folks.

ETA: Thanks to debmarshall for telling me about these interview questions once upon a time.

Quotes, drawings, and inspirational photos gather on my inspiration board. The idea is that eventually it will be fabric overtop of cork board, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Right now my inspiration board for Good Night, Odile is fabric on the wall:



Above the navy "board" is my spreadsheet with agent information.

I enjoy gathering quotes about writing in general and that pertain to my WIP, as well as photos to do with various hobbies or traits from the story. For example, ballet is important to Gina, so I found some awesome photos of ballerinas (Gillian Murphy and Polina Semionova, to name a couple pictured here):



What I find just as much fun, if not more, is "casting" my book (based on looks and demeanour, not acting ability):



You may recognize a face or two. :)

Thank you, by the way, for all your encouraging comments to my last post! I figured it was a temporary thing but felt like post-venting ... and I'm feeling so much better now. So much so, in fact, that I finally collaged the front of my HIST 215 binder:

( My binder )

Who would play your main characters if your book were made into a movie?

It's all ravelda's fault that I have of yet done nothing productive this morning. She made dolls of her characters. I made the mistake of clicking through to the dollmaker. Behold Gina, Earthly and Ranorian.

Earthly



Ranorian



Thanks, Karen! ;)

I took the Jung personality test for Ryan, the MC of Jessie. Here are his results:



or alternatively



Fun!

Pick three characters from one or more of your books or WIPs and go to http://babynames.com or the baby name site of your choice to look up the meanings of their names. Copy and paste the meanings and your characters' names into your blog, and tell us if the meanings fit.

Gina, the protagonist of Good Night, Odile -- 'Gina' is apparently of Italian origin. It is derived from 'Regina' and means 'Queen'. Quite honestly, Gina isn't very queenly. She's a loner. However, she will sacrifice a lot for people that she cares about and people in her charge, so in that sense she is sort of regal.

Michelle, one of the protagonists of Believe It -- 'Michelle' is of French origin and means 'Who is like God?' I'm not quite sure how to interpret that.

Candace, an important supporting character in Good Night, Odile -- 'Candace' means 'Queen of Ethiopia' and is of English origin. Candace is more queenly than Gina, particularly in temperament, so I would agree with this. Although I can't honestly say that I agree with the Ethiopian part, mainly because I don't know exactly how to interpret that, either. :)

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I like doing memes. They are perfect procrastination devices.

Usually I don't have a problem with clutter. My eyes sort of glaze over and I just don't see it. Today, though, as I was attempting to make some sense of things, I suddenly saw the clutter on my desk, and believe me when I say that it wasn't pretty. I muttered to myself as I swept things to the floor and retrieved lost scrunchies from beneath the desk. I carted miscellaneous notes and textbooks to my room. Now I can see my desk again and so I can get some schoolwork done.

Wait, is that a dustbunny?

I was browsing the Absolute Write Water Cooler and came across the subject line, "Google your protagonist". Out of curiousity, I did just that (I googled supporting characters too), and came up with the following:

Gina Hartmann -- A sculptor
Andrew Davies -- Emmy winning screenwriter
Heather Smith -- Up and coming Canadian singer
Candace Watson -- A consultant (for something ... the link didn't work)

How about you? What did your protagonists, villians, and supporting characters do in their past lives?

One of the first rules of writing fantasy that I ever picked up was to make your villains three dimensional. As I thought back over books that I had read and enjoyed, it made complete sense. Thanks to Half-Blood Prince, we saw a human side to Voldemort. Marion Zimmer Bradley brought the legendary sorceress Morgan le Fay to life in the Mists of Avalon. I mean, sure, Sauron was pretty much evil, but he's an exception. The best villains are perhaps better known as antagonists (although I will admit a romantic preference for the terms 'villain', 'hero', and 'heroine'). Dictionary.com defines an 'antagonist' as "a person who is opposed to, struggles against, or competes with another; opponent; adversary", but a 'villain' is defined as "a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel".

It's easy to see the difference, and it's a difference that is important to keep in mind during the writing process, or it might be far too easy to slip into the trap of making the villain as evil as possible in order to provide contrast for the protagonist. I know that when I started Good Night, Odile several years ago, or Ariel as it was known then, the reader's first introduction to the villain was:

A navy-clothed woman paced across the room. Her skirt swished the floor, and her hands were clasped behind her back. She was straight-backed, and her face held a frown.

In the next few lines, I can see words and phrases like 'sniffed', 'impatiently', 'kill those who get in your way', etc. A few pages later, she doesn't hesitate to torture her niece, the princess (the old heroine, before I decided to kill her off pre-storytime). There's a brief mention of something that was "rightfully" hers, but other than that, there is no motivation, no humanity. I can tell you without a second thought that I didn't have any tucked away to reveal later, either.

I can also tell you that I am happy with the villains in the story now. I've developed a background for these characters as well as the protagonists, they have their moments of humanity, and they truly believe that their way is the right way. I will admit to tucking a few suprises here and there into the story, things that may lead the reader to think one way when it actually, in light of later knowledge, leads them another way. Some of these things relate to the villains and their past and their future. Some of them change the way the protagonists view the villains, for better and for worse.

In the last draft of Good Night, Odile, I launched at least three odious surprises on the characters and the readers in the climactic scene. As a result, it was long, tedious, and not very exciting at all. I've since revised it so that one of the surprises (one of the most despicable, in my opinion) comes into play a third of the way through the book. This works much better, and I had so much fun writing how the characters react and evolve because of it -- and, as a result, how they react in the climax when the rest of the muck is dumped on their heads.

I spent three hours last night writing six pages, singlespaced, of the least well-written synopsis I have ever written. However odious the sentence structure is, though, what matters is that finally, after weeks of wondering and worrying, I have the entire plot of the sequel worked out. Every scene. Every important bit of dialogue that has crossed my mind. Beginning to end, I wrote it all down, and I can't wait to get my claws into it. For now, though, I'm going to go back to the rewrites of Good Night, Odile, to finish one of five scenes that I have left.

I've been having an e-mail conversation back and forth with an old drama friend, and the topic turned to superstition. I'll mention my own feelings about it next time, but how do you feel? Does a black cat crossing your path send chills through your pores? Do you preserve your poor mother's back by avoiding the cracks?

I finished another big scene tonight. Gina and her father duked it out for the final time. My poor girl ... but not to worry, for in my quest to finish the smaller scene that finishes the chapter, I realized that she snores! I find this hilarious, but I couldn't tell you why. Anyways, with that scene done, I have ... *checks* ... seven scenes left. I know, it seems like I never get beyond seven scenes, but it's because I realized that there are a few more scenes I haven't quite done justice to! In a quick rundown of each of those scenes:

- the aforementioned smaller scene that finishes the chapter and is darn fun to write
- the all-important "whisked away" scene
- the arrival in the pseudo-medieval world
- meeting my darling scout (I have the Tonks actress -- Natalia Tena -- picked out for her)
- jump ahead to the point where they realize they have dangerous powers
- a swimming and hair-shearing scene
- last but not least, a PARAGRAPH (the scene got demoted) about a blizzard

Ah, I suppose I should explain the subject of this post. I could leave you with your visions of forest debris on the attack, but this morning I'm not that mean because I have never had so much fun describing what a character looks like. The world that Good Night, Odile takes place in was created by the First Four, otherwise known as the four elements. They had a chance to pick a human-ish form because, you know, the human form is so coveted. ;) (Come on, opposing thumbs? How cool is that?!) Anyways, you can imagine the havoc -- I mean, cough cough, the creativity -- one can wreak on what an elemental deity looks like in human form. I give you one hint, and one only: mossy lips.

Meeeeeeow!