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2005: Quenton Pramick is Not My Boyfriend

Gwenfrewi, a weird high school student, has her world turned upside down when her bff, ultra geek Quenton, announces he is switching schools. Maybe she is in love with him after all? Or maybe it’s just that he’s literally her only friend. What even happened with all of her former friends? Whatever, they suck.

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2005 - Mishka Matfei

Mishka is a goody two-shoes in love with his capricious classmate Emily. Emily seems to prefer moody troublemaker Claude. Meanwhile, Mishka’s best friend, Artis, a wacky whimsical guy starts dating Mishka’s older sister, Kristina. All of this is very difficult to deal with.

Mishka runs into Claude at the CD store, browsing classical music CDs, and discovers that underneath that intimidating exterior, Claude’s really nice and cool. Claude invites Mishka to sit with him and Emily for lunch at school the next day, to Emily’s consternation. 

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2004: It was by all appearances a lovely day

Sullivan is really lonely and grouchy as the only student in her class who wears black. Finally she makes a friend in a timid new student, Barnabas, who has a similar sense of style. Unluckily, now that she has a vulnerability, the school administration strikes and forces her into a wacky program intended to take away her individuality. Barnabas has been sent away... or have they?

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2000: Magic Rings

The Queen has sent Orchid away to live in the country. Orchid finds a blue ring and a manual explaining how to use it, and Orchid learns how to turn invisible. While wandering through the forest, Orchid meets a wild girl who looks exactly like her! It turns out they were twins, separated as infants, when their mother (who was queen at the time) had to flee the castle. The wild girl, Iris, has a purple ring and she can like teleport.

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2001: Vilea and Lorya

Vilea is a magical elvish princess, but she goes to middle school just like everyone else. She super misses her best friend Lorya (also magical, but human), who got taken out of school when she went to live with her evil dad. Vilea’s school gets attacked one day by a terrorist group that Lorya’s dad runs. Vilea and her friends almost get kidnapped, but are saved at the last minute by Starridor (the royal wizard, also human) and his apprentice Rynn (also human). Actually, Rynn did most of the saving. 

This was going to be a companion story to my friend Lindsee’s story. Lindsee was writing about an elvish princess named Sea, it was set in the middle earth. Vilya was her mother. I believe Lindsee’s story involved an arranged marriage.

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2001: Keep Out

The working title for this one originated from the message I scrawled on the front of my notebook and had little to do with the actual story. Yavanna, who is mute, lives with her abusive stepmother and aloof stepsister (named Yara, she’s a poet). When Yintaj, a girl from a country across the sea, moves in with the Tamalian family down the road, the two girls become complicated friends, and Yavanna becomes more confident as a result of this bond. When her step mother punishes her for this friendship, Yavanna gets the courage to run away, even though it means leaving her friend behind.

I started writing this in middle school, and shared a lot of it with my friends. 

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1997: To America We Go

when i was six we read “a lion to guard us” in class and i had a dream about it. i decided to write my own, more complex story about unaccompanied children fleeing to america. in my version there were twins, and the domestic situation they were fleeing was more extreme. But I never actually made it to the point where they got on a boat. As I worked on the story there were more and more siblings somehow, and each of them played a musical instrument, except for Amanda, who had no musical talent but was a writer.

this is the first story i ever really worked on, the beginning of when i considered myself a writer.

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my hard drive died like two years ago now and i lost the majority of my old writing - whatever isn’t in a notebook at my parents house or in the cloud is totally gone, so that’s most of it. I’m thinking that i should document what i can remember of all of those stories so i’m going to do that here. 

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old stories new stories

so i wrote an outline for the story, abyssland, as i mentioned here a while back. it’s an old story, a story i started developing for nanowrimo back in like 2014,15? my thinking was that maybe this was the story i could finish. so cmae up with an idea for the ending and outlined it. it was a major breakthrough i thought. but i changed my mind, i guess. i don’t want to do what i outlined anymore so now i’m back to not knowing how this damn book will end, and i’m back to being kind of stalled. but i’ve been doing some brainstorming lately i have a few ideas so i’ll see if any of them take off.

the only thing, is that i designed a bunch of new settings, characters, and situations for this story that i am now no longer going to be using, at least for this tale. but there was some promising stuff in there that i don’t really want to throw away. I guess Kane and Dorian are goign to have to be the heroes of their own novel. someday. i also had a story about a merperson that i really wanted to write but put on hold for abyssland. i wish i could get things done! i really do.

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Actually

The question I get the most is how I write characters that feel like real people. 

Generally when I’m designing a human being, I deconstruct them into 7 major categories:

1. Primary Drive 2. Fear: Major and Secondary 3. Physical Desires 4. Style of self expression 5. How they express affection 6. What controls them (what they are weak for) 7. What part of them will change.

1. Primary Drive: This is generally related to the plot. What are their plot related goals? How are they pulling the plot forward? how do they make decisions? What do they think they’re doing and how do they justify doing it. 2. Fear: First, what is their deep fear? Abandonment? being consumed by power? etc. Second: tiny fears. Spiders. someone licking their neck. Small things that bother them. At least 4. 3. Physical desires. How they feel about touch. What is their perceived sexual/romantic orientation. Do their physical desires match up with their psychological desires.

4. Style of self expression: How they talk. Are they shy? Do they like to joke around and if so, how? Are they anxious or confident internally and how do they express that externally. What do words mean to them? More or less than actions? Does their socioeconomic background affect the way they present themselves socially?  5. How they express affection: Do they express affection through actions or words. Is expressing affection easy for them or not. How quickly do they open up to someone they like. Does their affection match up with their physical desires. how does the way they show their friends that they love them differ from how they show a potential love interest that they love them. is affection something they struggle with?

6. What controls them (what they are weak for): what are they almost entirely helpless against. What is something that influences them regardless of their own moral code. What– if driven to the end of the wire— would they reject sacrificing. What/who would they cut off their own finger for.  What would they kill for, if pushed. What makes them want to curl up and never go outside again from pain. What makes them sink to their knees from weakness or relief. What would make them weep tears of joy regardless where they were and who they were in front of. 

7. WHAT PART OF THEM WILL CHANGE: people develop over time. At least two of the above six categories will be altered by the storyline–either to an extreme or whittled down to nothing. When a person experiences trauma, their primary fear may change, or how they express affection may change, etc. By the time your book is over, they should have developed. And its important to decide which parts of them will be the ones that slowly get altered so you can work on monitoring it as you write. making it congruent with the plot instead of just a reaction to the plot. 

That’s it.

But most of all, you have to treat this like you’re developing a human being. Not a “character” a living breathing person. When you talk, you use their voice. If you want them to say something and it doesn’t seem like (based on the seven characteristics above) that they would say it, what would they say instead?

If they must do something that’s forced by the plot, that they wouldn’t do based on their seven options, they can still do the thing, but how would they feel internally about doing it?

How do their seven characteristics meet/ meld with someone else’s seven and how will they change each other?

Once you can come up with all the answers to all of these questions, you begin to know your character like you’d know one of your friends. When you can place them in any AU and know how they would react.

They start to breathe.

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Wherever i talk about writing Vivien gets on me about outlines like she thinks they are really important and i don't know why. She is a writer too but she is a poet and she doesn't use outlines because her poems are short enough where i guess she doesnt need them so I'm not sure why she has such string opinions about outlines but she brings them up whenever i happen to mention that i might not exactly have an ending for a story I'm writing Anyway the point is i wrote an outline for this story because i thought Vivien would probably just bug me about it until i did anyway and the outline is pretty rough but i figured out some important things about the ending? and the climax? And the point of the story? Stuff that i had previously been trying not to think about so i guess my point is maybe outlines can sometimes be useful

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Nothing i am working on at the moment feels very good or important but maybe a low stakes project is what i need

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i’ll only make a couple of characters and they’ll all have something important to do with each others plot!

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Writing on the train. My co-worker didn't want this presh little book she received as a gift because she has enough notebooks already so I took it off her hands in spite of the fact that I too have enough notebooks already. After a few months writing a newish story about a trans woman's train journey to visit her dying grandmother, I am back to writing about Sulea again but have changed her name to Sullivan and have aged all the characters up a few years so they can be in high school. The themes I was exploring were unbearably dark for a novel about twelve year olds, but in the rewrite, I'm going to attempt to balance things better both by making the characters a lil more mature and by shoveling the trauma at them in more adolescent-sized chunks.

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I decided to rewrite section one as well

A few months ago I decided it would be best to try and focus my energy on the story I deemed nearest to completion - Superland - the one I’ve been working on since I was 15. At 123 thousand words it’s the longest thing I’ve ever written. In the month since I resolved to systematically finish the story, I have come no closer to a resolution. I came up with some compelling new scenes for the main character’s mother, at least.

More and more I am thinking that parts 2 and 3 (about 85 percent of the narrative) will have to be completely cut. A lot of the writing is from a while ago when I didn’t know where the story was going or what the characters were like or what the tone even was, and now it’s sort of a mess. A huge mess, actually. I want it to go away. I want to start again. 

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A few months ago I decided it would be best to try and focus my energy on the story I deemed nearest to completion - Superland - the one I've been working on since I was 15. At 123 thousand words it's the longest thing I've ever written. In the month since I resolved to systematically finish the story, I have come no closer to a resolution. I came up with some compelling new scenes for the main character's mother, at least.

More and more I am thinking that parts 2 and 3 (about 85 percent of the narrative) will have to be completely cut. A lot of the writing is from a while ago when I didn't know where the story was going or what the characters were like or what the tone even was, and now it's sort of a mess. A huge mess, actually. I want it to go away. I want to start again.