#self promoting? yes but only because I had brainrot I needed to talk about

[streettealee]

Lila Raftis was so utterly terrified of being alone, it was a wonder she hadn't fainted yet out of sheer overwhelming fright.

This is the first line of WBITHOM and it holds possibly a surprising amount of importance for the whole book. Most characters' first lines in their POV have significance. This small bit is just focused on Lila though, our key main protagonist.

We see over and over again throughout the story that Lila is a lonely person. It shouldn't come as a surprise to readers because I don't think I was exactly subtle with it. But it comes up, again and again, a recurring theme (there are a lot of recurring themes and motifs in WBITHOM) that is essentially the crux of Lila's real, underlying problem within the narrative: she feels like she has no one. And being thrown into this whole other dimension perpetuates this because she's divided from her family. But she gradually forms connections with the likes of the Merry Thieves and Alastair Carstairs, ones that we get the sense she has not had for some time, and it's breaking her down because she's realising just what she's missing out on in her home dimension; what she could have if she let people in more and stepped out of certain comfort zones.

She also needs to change. We see she even struggles with connecting with James and Matthew, for example, because she continuously has to lie or omit things around them. Lila puts up a version of herself that is perfectly curated by her to appear a certain way to people, and it's only when she starts letting go of that mask and allows people to make their own assessments of her character from a much more organic perspective that she can move past feelings of loneliness. And so eventually she can accept a certain amount of solitude, because her own company will feel freer and less alien.

Or, that was some of the ideas behind her anyway. There's a lot of thought that went into my fic and the way I've portrayed certain characters, and not everything is for only one reason. Not everything has only one meaning. And not everyone has just one theme.

Give Wasting Beats In This Heart Of Mine a try. You might like something about it.