Me And My Weird Writings

I’m not sure if I've ever actually said this, but I love writing novels. I also hate writing novels, but even then I still love it.

The last time I wrote a blog, I was feeling rather discontent with the book I am currently writing. But given the fact that the last time I wrote a blog was February 9^th, I have had a lot of time to change my mind.

Recently I have fallen in love with this book all over again. It is very rare for me to find characters that I am passionate enough about write a book about them. There are even cases where I have written an entire book and not been passionate about the characters.

I haven’t had characters I truly loved since CONSEQUENCE, not until now (or until August, when I started writing my current book). The other day I realized something bittersweet: I had barely thought about the characters from my trilogy in about six months, not since I started school.

I remember the night before my first day of school, and when I was halfway between dreaming and waking, I had this image in my head. All my characters were gathered around me, and they were telling me that it was okay, that I had to move forward, not just stay trapped in a time capsule of my own creating. Then all the characters disappeared, save for Phoenix and her offspring. She gathered her daughters around her protectively, and hissed ‘They’re mine now. You can’t hurt them any more.’ Of course she would stay true to her personality even in a dream…

Since then I have hardly thought about my characters. The only times they’re entered my mind have been when I've seen things that remind me of them. I can’t see the actress Isabelle Fuhrman without thinking of my book, because she is how I pictured Phoenix to look right from the beginning, and the actress Molly Quinn looks a lot like how I pictured Persephone. And for some bizarre reason, Herr Flick from ‘Allo ‘Allo reminds me of the Tsar. I don’t even know why that is…it must be the blonde hair or something.

In August I began writing a book called The Choices We Made. Before I started writing, I created a framework for the world it was set in, and did a lot of planning, which I generally don’t do. Because of school, I have not had the time to write much (the book now sits at 25,020 words, and I've been writing it for nearly eight months.) But I don’t think lack of time is the only reason I have written so little.

Some books need time to mature. TRANSCEND was one of these books. In November it was one year since I finished the first draft of TRANSCEND, and it is still not quite ready for publication.

The Choices We Made is perhaps more mature than I am. One of my worries with this book is that it will be dismissed as a book for teenagers because I was fifteen when I started writing it, and if I get my act together it will be completed whilst I am still sixteen. Despite my age, this book is not solely for teenagers. I’m not writing this book for a particular audience – to be honest, I haven’t even decided if I want people to read it – but if it were directed at a particular age group, it would be adults, not teenagers.

The book has this maturity, this adult depth to it that I am not even sure how I wrote. This book has a power I didn't believe I was capable. There are times when I read my own writing and think how did I write this?

There are also times when I think why did I write this? An example of this was in my English Language mock exam in October. There was this mundane question of ‘What is the best thing you have eaten?’ and I didn't want to write an essay about something boring like that, so I made a risky decision: I wrote that the best thing I had ever eaten was the heart of a cheating ex husband. I even gave a description of murdering him and removing his heart and frying it. The only lines I remember are: ‘so I decided to confront him: with a meat cleaver.’ And: ‘as I swallowed the last mouthful, I glanced down at my stomach, and whispered: “Eat your heart out, Joe.”’ I think I really freaked out my English teacher.

The worst part is that I did it again. I mean, I didn't write about eating hearts again, but I did push the boundaries of what one should write on an exam paper. Last week at school we were doing mock exams (again), and on the English Language one there was this really mundane question of ‘What is your favourite place?’ and I wrote that my favourite place was an abandoned exam hall that zombies had invaded when they were looking for brains to eat, but that they only found one brain in the entire hall. This somehow turned into a morbid poem about how the zombies are lurking inside the walls and if you have a brain they will kill you.

My English teacher hasn't finished marking the exams yet, so I don’t think she’s read it. Though the other day, when she was looking through my coursework, she said that I have a “gothic” imagination. I quite like that description – it sounds far more elegant than “warped” or “twisted” or any of the other terms I use to describe myself.

I don’t know what it is that possesses me to write all that warped stuff. Perhaps it’s because I like to write things that are different, and it’s a bonus if I can freak people out.

With The Choices We Made, my “let’s scare everybody!” technique of writing hasn't come into play (Thankfully!). There are no robots, no crazy scientists, no all-powerful Tsars trying to take over the world. Granted, it’s set in a different world and the main character is going to become a dictator, but the book is about human nature.

CONSEQUENCE was also about human nature, but The Choices We Made doesn't have all the science-fantasy props. The story and the characters speak for themselves.

That’s one of the reasons I love writing this book: it’s about humans, and about what drives a person to betray those that they care for. I think, ultimately The Choices We Made is about loyalty and sacrifice, and about how one determines where one’s loyalties lie.

My main character is generally very good in terms of following the storylines I set out for her, but one area where she has not done this is currently having adverse effects on my plot. How can she choose to practically lead the dude to his own execution if she’s falling in love with him? I currently have a rule where I won’t let my characters say ‘I love you’ because it will cause too many complications further down the line. The only problem with this is that, in spite of my sinister, morbid, gothic imagination, I am still a complete romantic, and all I want is for my characters to live happily ever after in a castle in the clouds. And when that gets boring, the castle will fall back down to earth because it has no foundations, and my characters can go back to the position they started in.

The truth is that I do not write things because they’re mental or because it’s fun to freak people out or make people question my sanity… I write the story that I need to write, that is all.

This Post Was NOT Inspired By Valentine's Day.

So today I am writing about love. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is Valentine’s Day on Friday. It actually has more to do with Game of Thrones than it does with the 14^th of February.

In August, I read the first book of the A Song of Ice and Fire series (A Game of Thrones), and in September, I read half of the second book (A Clash of Kings.) On January 28^th, it was my sixteenth birthday, and I got season one of the TV show Game of Thrones as a birthday present. On Saturday last week, I started watching said TV show, and yesterday, I watched season 2. All of season 2, might I add.

If you have never experienced a ten-hour TV marathon, let me inform you of this: it is painful. Your back will hurt, your head will hurt, and your eyes will hurt, but it will all be worth it. (Implying said TV show is good. But if you watch it for 10 hours, it will be good, because nobody would be stupid enough to watch something they hate for ten hours.)

So yesterday, I was about midway through my Game of Thrones marathon, and, what I think of as Writer’s Brain started to kick in. Writer’s Brain is where I can’t just watch a TV show or movie or read a book without thinking about it on a deeper level, thinking about plot and characterization, rather than just “Oh my gosh this thing is so awesome!”

The things that Writer’s Brain was fixated on yesterday were the relationships between characters, specifically the “romantic” relationships. I mean, Game of Thrones has a lot of characters, and most of them are either married, betrothed, or sleeping with someone. The relationship that really triggered this line of thought was that of Robb Stark and Talisa. If I had had to make a choice between Ned Stark’s sons, I’d have chosen Jon Snow any day, perhaps because the books (or what I’d read of them) showed more from his perspective than they did from Robb’s.

But the romance between Robb and Talisa changed the way I saw him. Watching them fall for each other…I could really see the love between them, and this made me think about my own stories. When was the last time I had written a love story that wasn’t completely toxic. I think it must have been that of Persephone and Drew in CONSEQUENCE. Given the fact that it’s been about a year and a half since CONSEQUENCE was completed, I began to wonder what the hell I’d been writing since then.

Basically, the “love” stories I wrote, weren’t all that loving. There were Melinoe and Blake, who basically tried to destroy each other, there were some people in TRANSCEND who I can’t talk about because it’s not published yet, there were some other characters in other books I attempted to write. And then there was Katerina Kamanev, my current main character. She is probably the most toxic of them all. I’ve only written about 21,000 words of that book, so it’s nowhere near done, which means I can’t really start writing anything new.

But when I do write something new, I don’t want to write another toxic love story. I want to write something that’s actually about love, not jealousy and schemes and treachery (it’s rather ironic that Game of Thrones made me realize this, given the fact that “jealousy, schemes and treachery” are what that series is about).

I want to write love like Persephone and Drew’s again, love where the characters don’t have these hidden dark sides or deep commitment issues, or whatever other problems I create for my characters. I also want to have a main character that isn’t semi-evil, because I’m getting tired of writing characters like that.

I feel like it’s been a very long time since I wrote characters that were actually redeemable, rather than just plain evil like the ones I write now. What is it inside my mind that is preventing me from writing something good, rather than something that makes me wonder if I’m going insane?

Once my current book is finished (so, in a very long time), I want to write something different to my current stuff. No apocalypses, no wars, no dictators, no robots (okay, you can write a decent love story with robots. That is, if CONSEQUENCE is decent, which I’m still not sure of.) I want to write something that doesn’t make me think I’m a female version of Ben from Outnumbered (the fact that he mentioned Game of Thrones in last week’s episode is even more proof that I am like him.)

So that’s my mission: write something…*searches for word to describe what I mean*. The only word that really comes to mind is “pure”, and that has connotations of….basically everything I don’t write about. I don’t mean pure in the sense of milkmaids and virgin brides. What I mean is a love story that actually makes you believe in love. I remember when I read Allegiant, and the thing that I couldn’t stop thinking about (other than that ending that made me sob for a week) was the love between Tris and Tobias, and how strong and beautiful it was. There was this indescribable quality about it, and that’s what I want to write. I want to write at least one book that is beautiful, that makes people believe in good, rather than believe in the bad in the world.

The other day I was thinking about the end of TRANSCEND, and I considered changing it. You see, the ending is currently in the vague realm of “and they all lived happily ever after, but here’s a fun flashback to show what an evil bastard this character used to be”. What I wanted to do was change the ending, because I’d had second thoughts on some of the pairings. There are some characters that belong together, yet really don’t belong together, and no matter who they end up with I will have regrets. But I’m glad I’ve kept the ending the same. If I made those characters get together, I would have completely changed the message of the entire series.

When it comes to the end of TRANSCEND, all I can really do to explain my feelings is quote The Book Thief: ‘I have hated the words, and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.’

*****I Googled Talisa from Game of Thrones to check I'd spelled her name right, and WHAT THE HELL? I'm not sure if I'm brave enough to watch season 3, HOW CAN SUCH THINGS HAPPEN? I think I need to go and cry for a bit now.

Books, My Emotions After Reading A Really Awesome Book Called Allegiant, Evil Character-Murdering Authors, And A Bunch Of Random Book-Related Thoughts.

I spent most of this morning crying over a book. Eighteen months ago, I read this totally amazing book called Divergent. Reading it shifted something in me, altered my outlook on life, on humanity, on myself. I have always questioned things, analysed things, and Divergent made me analyse myself, question myself. It helped me discover more of who I am. Each time I reread it, I get something more out of it. And each time I reread, I find myself relating more and more to the main character.

Yesterday, I bought Allegiant, the final book in the Divergent trilogy. I planned to have a “Sleep is for the weak” attitude and stay up all night reading, but at about quarter to three, I put the book down and decided to finish it in the morning.

So when I woke up this morning, I read the final 116 pages of Allegiant. And I spent the last 50ish pages completely sobbing. I found the ending beautiful, in a tragic way. It was so human, so heartbreaking, and so honest.

I always thought that The Hunger Games was the book that changed me the most, but now I think it was Divergent. That book taught me so much about basic human personality traits such as selflessness and bravery. But the thing I love most about that book is the characters.

I think Tris, the main character, is one of my all-time favourite fictional characters. I love her because she’s not perfect, and she doesn’t always make the right decisions. But she is brave, she is selfless, she is a hero. And she is amazing. She is so human, yet she is so much more than human.

The characters of Tris and Tobias seem so real, and when I read those books, I feel like I am reading about real people, not just fictional characters. Tris and Tobias’s relationship is flawed, it is imperfect, because they are imperfect, but there is something pure about it, something beautiful. They belong together not just because they love each other, but because they make each other better people.

When I read books like Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant, I am reminded of why I want to be a writer. Some books can affect people so deeply, and I want to write like that. I want to create characters that become so real that they carve their way into people’s hearts. I want to create characters that make a mark.

When I finish reading book series’s that I love, I always have this feeling of what will I do with my life now? And for some reason I don’t have that with Allegiant. Perhaps this is because the ending felt so…final, I guess. It was a conclusion to a chapter in those characters lives, and it was a conclusion to a chapter in the readers’ lives.

When I am obsessed with a book, I always think the obsession will never fade. When I read The Hunger Games, my sister said: “You won’t still be obsessed with this in a year from now.” I was, by the way, but in a different way. Some obsessions fade, they give way to something else. I guess the obsession is like having a crush on the book, and then the crush turns to love, and what you feel for the book is a lot deeper.

I am not crazy obsessed with The Hunger Games any more. I love it; it is one of my top two favourite books (oh my gosh, I actually managed to narrow it down to two!), and it means a lot to me. The Hunger Games showed me a whole genre of books I never would have read; it introduced me to dystopia, to post-apocalyptic novels. If I hadn’t have read THG, I wouldn’t have written CONSEQUENCE.

With Divergent, I love it differently to how I love/loved THG. There is a part of me which is still in the Book Crush stage. And there is a part of me that has moved on to the In Love With The Book stage. Normally, after a year and a half, I would have started to move on from a book, no matter how much I loved it, but I haven’t done that with the Divergent trilogy.

Those books have been there for me whenever I needed them. They were the books I read when I was upset and needed to feel better, the books I read when I needed to restore my faith in humanity (which is ironic, given the genre), they were like a friend, I guess.

Some of the boys at school seem to find it entertaining to tell me that books are a waste of paper. I am always tempted to reply with “You’re a waste of oxygen”, but I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say, so instead I just start defending books, and my voice gets higher and higher pitched, and they tend to respond with a particular word that starts with F. (Why do teenage boys swear so much?)

The reason I get so defensive when they insult books, is that for a long time books have been my everything. Books have made me who I am; they have shaped my personality, moulded me into this person who I could never have been were it not for fiction. And yes, that sometimes means that I act a bit crazy because I would fit better in a fictional world than in the real one, but I don’t care.

Books rest on the line between the magic and the ordinary. To some people they are mundane and ordinary, and to some people they are a whole world. How many things are there that are like books? One of the annoying boys at school who told me that books were a waste of paper said that books were pointless because you can just watch TV instead. If I hadn’t had to go into a chemistry lesson at that exact moment, I would have gone into full rant mode (which is always scary) and explained about how television is NOTHING compared to books.

When you watch TV, it’s all there, it’s already made. When you read a book, you have to use the writer’s words to weave a world inside your head. You have to create something based on another person’s creation. A book is a body that has no blood. It has flesh, organs, but there is a vital part missing. The reader’s imagination is the blood. It flows through the book, makes it work, makes it a living thing.

As a writer, it is sometimes hard to think about the fact that when someone reads my books, they don’t read the book in my head. They don’t get my thoughts, my imagination; they only get my words, and they have to make of them what they will. The book I write is not the book they read. There is a part of me that wants to scream “You will read this my way! I made this! I wrote this! You have to see it how I see it!” And there is another part of me that marvels at the beauty of the whole book arrangement. My words, my silly little thoughts that I write down, become something more than me when other people read them. They change, they take on their own lives, and they constantly shift and alter. They will never be my words again, because I have given them to other people. And I’m okay with that.

As a writer, I sometimes forget that I am a reader, too. I forget that what it’s like to read a book, because I’m too lost in the process of creating books. When I read books like Allegiant, The Fault in Our Stars, or The Book Thief, I am suddenly hit with the realization that I am a complete hypocrite. What do those books have in common? They all made me cry. BECAUSE THE EVIL AUTHORS MURDERED MY FAVOURITE CHARACTERS!

It’s only a few hours since I finished reading Allegiant, so the pain is still pretty raw. I knew how it ended before I read it; I knew I would cry at the end. But there’s a difference between knowing something’s going to happen, and reading about it happening.

And then I remember that I am one of those evil authors who murder characters. I mean, the main feedback I get about CONSEQUENCE is “Why did you kill Persephone?” The answer to that, by the way, is that I was killing Drew, and I wanted to spare Persephone the pain of living without him. I’m nice like that, see. Or maybe I killed her because I thought she was kind of one-dimensional. (I’ve changed my mind about that now.)

I regretted killing Persephone the moment I started writing AMEND. I regret killing my characters. I regret being an evil character-murderer. And no, that does not mean I am suddenly going to change my mind about killing the love interest at the end of the book I’m currently working on.

I think sometimes characters do have to die. Not because the authors are sadists who want to brutally murder the readers’ feelings, but because it would be unrealistic if all the minor or horrible characters died, and the heroes were left unscathed.

I, personally, like to kill off my favourites, because I can really get into the pain of their deaths. In the second novel I ever wrote, there was this character called Maeve. She was a little bit like Phoenix in some ways (troubled past, hated lots of people, had a best friend who was kind of naïve). Maeve was my favourite character. Naturally, I had her throat slit. That was the first time I killed one of my favourite characters. I loved it. Can I just reiterate that I am not evil, not a sadist, and not some weird twisted monster? I just like to write dramatic books.

Yet when I read books where characters die… Well, I think the fact that I have spent half the day crying over Allegiant is a clue as to how I react. I am broken; Allegiant shattered my heart into a thousand tiny pieces. But it was worth it. I think if a book/book series has an important message, or has a lasting effect on people, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t end happily. It’s the story which makes a book, and the ending is only part of that. It’s not the ending that makes the reader fall in love with the story; it’s the characters, the words, the plot. Judging a book by its ending is like judging a person by how they die. Judging a book by the story is like judging a person by how they live.

^ Me with Allegiant, before it broke my heart.

The Hero.

So I haven’t written a blog in about two months. That is one of the many joys of writer’s block. Other than writer’s block, the main reason I haven’t written any blogs is because I have been busy. (This is a very shocking fact. Normally I just sit around thinking about books.)

And the reason I’ve been busy? I have started going to school. For somebody who likes to write about human nature, I haven’t really had much experience of being around lots of people. Well, until last week.

Naturally, all this exposure to human nature makes me think about my writing, and about my characters. What I have realized is that humans are absolutely nothing like fictional characters. I mean, I knew this already, but not to the same extent. For example: the character of Kai. He just wouldn’t exist in the real world. As someone who has spent the last week-and-a-half around fifteen-year-old boys, I can say with 100 per cent certainty that they are nothing like they are in books. Specifically, nothing like they are in my books.

And that started me thinking about the concept of The Hero. The Hero is the good guy; examples of his personality traits include “getting the girl” and “defeating evil”. The Hero isn’t always a guy, sometimes he’s a girl, but today I’m talking about male versions of The Hero.

Girls who read a lot of books often find themselves frustrated by the lack of perfect males in the world. Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice guys in the world. But is nice enough? Nice doesn’t slay dragons and carry you away to castles in the clouds. Yes, booknerds want their guy to be sweet and kind, but they also want him to be heroic and brave, to be dark and mysterious. And in real life, most of those qualities don’t mix.

So where does the idea of The Hero come from? How do you get from the average real guy to Mr Perfect? How did this archetype come about when most human beings are so…depressingly average? One of my theories is that it came about in the age of knights and chivalry, when the act of going off to kill people over a bit of land became glorified. A guy would go off to fight in the 100 Years War, and before he left he would be all like “I love you. Promise to marry me so that if I die I know that you loved me”. And then he went off and killed a load of French guys in the name of “I have protected you from the French, my love. I am a hero.”

Yeah, that’s one theory. The other theory is that people romanticize real life in their heads to make it more interesting. I spend at least fifty per cent of my time doing this. The fact is: things are more interesting when you add some imagination. The problem with this is when you start adding imagination to people. These people are never going to live up to how they are in your head, and you’ll be sorely disappointed, and they’ll be wondering what they did wrong.

The people you meet, the people you see every day, they are almost certainly not going to be The Hero. They’re not going to sweep you off your feet and risk their lives to defend your honour. But The Hero does exist, I am sure of that. His good qualities are just more subtle. I believe in The Hero, I believe that he is out there somewhere. I also believe that any one of us can be The Hero, if we make the right choices. Sometimes the dragons that need slaying are only words, and sometimes the people who need defending aren’t damsels in distress, but just people who need to know they’ve got someone on their side. And as for castles in the clouds, I’m with Henry David Thoreau on that one. He said “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

And now, a round of applause for me because I managed to write a whole blog without using Phoenix as an example of something.

Melinoe, Irina, (and Phoenix), And The Awkward Moment When I Start Turning Into Them.

When I wrote AMEND, I suffered from this horrible little thing known as Second Novel Syndrome. Basically, it means that you’ve written a book, you’re happy with it, and you think you can do it again.

AMEND was the second second novel I had written, so I should have remembered all the terrible writer's block that Second Novel Syndrome creates. But no, I was blissfully oblivious as I started to write.

But the problem with AMEND perhaps wasn’t the book itself, but the characters in it. In CONSEQUENCE I could always relate to at least one of the protagonists. But AMEND was completely different.

For as start, it didn’t have two main characters, it had Melinoe, who was what would be considered as the main character. Then there was Irina, who was still a main character, but was only really in the first half of the book. And then there were characters like Phoenix and Kai and Haden who were still main characters, but not as much as Melinoe and Irina.

Out of these characters, Phoenix was really the only one I could relate to. Except she was thirty-two years old, she had three children, she was married. So I couldn’t really relate to her as much as I could in CONSEQUENCE. Well, except in the scene where she turns Abynechka into a warthog. I could totally relate to her in that bit. It was really awesome writing it, because I was just sitting in bed with a notebook on my lap, laughing, and thinking “revenge is sweet”.

But back to the characters I couldn’t relate to. Melinoe and Irina. My protagonists. From the moment I started writing, I found Melinoe challenging. She was, basically, a bitch. She loved other people’s pain, and she used her own pain as a distraction from the fact that she was completely empty inside, that she was devoid of humanity.

Can you see why I never liked her much? Strangely enough, I do like her now that I don’t have to write about her, because the trilogy is finished, I can see where she came from, and where she ended up, and that gives me a much stronger understanding of her.

But when I was writing it, I just wanted to strangle her. She probably would have liked that, actually. Unless I actually killed her, which would make her rather annoyed. Melinoe doesn’t like it when people try to kill her.

I thought that she was the one character I had ever written who I couldn’t relate to in the slightest, but it turned out, we actually had a couple of things in common. They were small, stupid, inconsequential things, but they were still things. For example, there’s a scene where Melinoe’s on a train, and she’s thinking about all the same people breathing the same air for an extended period of time. If there is one thing I hate, it’s a lack of fresh air. I also hate it when people yawn. It’s one of my weird quirks.

And then there’s the fact that Melinoe and I are both fifteen years old, 5’10”, with curly hair. And we both hate abbreviations. So that means we have, altogether, five things in common. Not very much compared to the many, many similarities between me and Phoenix.

My other main character, Irina, didn’t have that much in common with me either, though I found her easier to relate to, because she was more human, and not just metaphorically, seeing as Melinoe is half robot.

Irina has OCD, and I can’t stand it when things aren’t in the order I like them in. Irina is the youngest sibling, as am I. Irina is extremely tall, ditto me. But the things that make her who she is were nothing like me.

For a start, her whole existence was based on this belief that she wasn’t good enough, that she didn’t deserve respect, that she didn’t deserve to be treated like an equal. I always found it hard to get into that mindset, because my world-view is so completely opposite.

Where she thinks she’s not good enough for anybody, I think not everybody is good enough for me. I don’t mean that as in “Oh, I’m better than everybody” I don’t mean that at all. It’s more like, if someone treated me like crap, I would put them in their place, shout some horrible, yet grammatically correct, things at them, name a character after them, and be done with it. Yet if someone treated Irina like crap, she’d just let them.

And while we’re talking about how different people would react to such situations, I think I’ll just mention that Melinoe would totally try out execution by elephant on anyone who didn’t treat her with the utmost respect.

It’s strange though, Melinoe doesn’t take crap from anybody else, yet she isn’t very nice to herself. Not just in terms of self-harm, but also in the way she relates to other people. She deliberately keeps people at arms length, and ends up making herself miserable in the process. Because deep down, Melinoe shares Irina’s thing of “I am not good enough”.

Both of them are like that because of events that occurred in early childhood. Irina was basically shown that her father would have her die to save himself. And Melinoe…she had two people who fought so hard for her, yet ended up leaving her feeling like they had given up on her. In Melinoe’s eyes, Persephone chose Drew over her, and Haden only wanted her because he needed an heir to the throne.

And because of a lifetime of living with such beliefs, both Melinoe and Irina enter the book with not very good self esteem. The difference is: Melinoe thinks she has a right to be adored, and won’t be happy until she is, whereas Irina doesn’t think she deserves even the slightest bit of attention.

Personally, I’m closer to Melinoe’s way of thinking on this one. The difference is: if I wanted to be worshipped, I would work pretty damn hard to make myself someone that people could look up to. Whereas Melinoe thinks it’s her god-given right to be better than everybody else. Well, she is a Tsarevna, so I guess it goes with the territory.

But the main reason I struggled with AMEND was that I had to get into Melinoe’s head, I had to dig down to the very core of her being and find out what was there. And let me tell you this: Melinoe’s mind isn’t a very good place to be; it’s pretty dark inside. Whereas Irina’s just this faded kind of greyish colour, as though she’s been in the washing machine too many times, as though the same thing’s happened over and over again, and it’s worn her down into a blurry nothingness.

I’m not sure which is worse, Melinoe’s darkness, or Irina’s…blankness. Even in the worst parts of CONSEQUENCE, Phoenix and Persephone still had a light burning within them. I could always relate to that so much more, because all I’ve ever wanted to do was shine.

But lately, my inner Melinoe and my inner Irina have taken a trip to the surface. Because the fact is: when you don’t shine, your light begins to fade. Melinoe isn’t very fun to live with; I see why the Tsar kept her underground, away from the world.

But in a way, Irina’s worse. Melinoe would never give up, but Irina always gives up. Whilst my inner Melinoe was making me treat everyone like crap, avoid the world, and develop a passionate hatred for humanity*, my inner Irina was causing even more trouble, because of the lack of self-worth.

The one thing I can say to my credit is that I have always believed in myself, I have always thought I could do anything I wanted. And then all of a sudden, I no longer believed that. I thought I was worthless, that I wasn’t good enough for anybody. The lovely little rejection letter I got from Scholastic yesterday didn’t exactly do anything to counteract that belief.

When you’ve lost faith in humanity, and lost faith in yourself, what’s left? What is there to stop you thinking that everything is pointless? Yesterday I felt pretty low, to put it mildly.

I was the worst combination of Melinoe and Irina that could ever come about. Okay, given Melinoe’s nature, it wasn’t the worst combination. I wasn’t torturing anyone or anything. But it was the most hopeless one.

But the strange thing was that it was my need to shine that finally got me to stop crying over how crap I felt. Because no matter how black and grey I appear to feel, or truly do feel, there’s always going to be a little bit of light working its way to the surface.

That’s one of the ways I’m most like Phoenix: no matter what’s happening, I’ll always have a need to be noticed, to be seen, to shine. And as messed up a character as she is, she’s the one I am happiest to be like, because her brightness is what will stop her from ever giving up.

She may be annoying, and self-centred, and too smart, and she may have a habit of alienating herself from other people because she thinks they’re not good enough for her, but she has self worth. Why? Because she’s not happy to be invisible. And in order to want to be seen by somebody else, somebody has to believe in themself. It’s the self-belief that makes Phoenix one of my strongest characters. She always puts herself first, because she truly values herself.

* By the way, I no longer have a passionate hatred for humanity. It only lasted a couple of hours.

Compromises.

In books, characters have to make choices, sacrifices, decisions that will change everything. And in real life, people make decisions too. They make decisions that are so unimportant that they make them without thinking. Whether it’s “what coloured socks will I wear today” or “should I sign out of Facebook, or stay on here staring at the screen for another two hours?” the decisions generally aren’t life-changing.

Making a decision is one thing; but what about compromises? What about the decisions that aren’t so easy to make. What about the decisions which are more than what socks you wear?

In CONSEQUENCE, I had this ridiculous habit of making my male characters perfect. Okay, realistically speaking, Kai couldn’t have been anything less than perfect, or Phoenix wouldn’t have gotten together with him. But Drew could have had more flaws, because Persephone is less picky than Phoenix. But no, they were both unrealistically…good.

In AMEND, this issue was to a lesser extent. My main male characters were Blake, Haden, and Kai. Okay, so Kai got even more perfect with age, but the other two weren’t perfect.

Blake almost had Melinoe executed just to prove a point, and although Haden seems all nice and regretful in AMEND, how much can he have truly changed from who he was in CONSEQUENCE? But despite the fact that they actually have flaws, Haden and Blake are still nice guys. My evil little mind is saying “wait till TRANSCEND”, because that book changes everything, but I’m not going to mention that right now.

Anyway, when I finished writing TRANSCEND, I wrote a book called RELEASE. This book was about one of Phoenix’s daughters, and it was set sixteen years after the end of TRANSCEND. Most of the storylines were incredibly disturbing, but it’s actually one of my favourite out of my books.

Anyway, it was in RELEASE that I had my first extremely flawed male main character. And in PLAYING WITH FIRE, the last book I wrote, my male character was also completely flawed. But the problem is: I don’t particularly like writing characters like that.

Okay, part of me is like “Yeah! Tortured fictional guys! Awesome!” but another part of me is like “No! They need to be good, they need to be kind, they need to be there for the main character, rather than constantly keeping her at arm’s length because they’re so caught up in themselves”.

You see, my female characters basically go through hell for practically the entirety of any book I write, and falling in love with the oh-so-perfect male character is meant to be a little bit of light relief from the “Oh crap! The world’s ending!” storylines.

So when the male characters aren’t ridiculously perfect guys who any girl would fall in love with, this poses a problem. Why? Because the female characters have to think “Is this guy really someone who I want in my life? Is he really good for me? Is liking him a waste of time?”

And what if his flaws are things that go against everything the female character believes in? Then what does she do? And can she stop liking him the moment she finds out that he’s not as totally perfect as he originally appeared to be? The answer to that is almost certainly no.

You’d think, as the writer, I could manipulate my characters into doing what I want, right? But I can’t. They just do whatever they want to, and I’m left trying to keep up. It’s not always the best position to be in, that lack of control. I mean, I don’t always like where the story’s going, yet I don’t get a say.

I mean, Miss Intelligent could end up with Mr Lacking In The Brain Department, and I wouldn’t be able to stop it. They could get married and have Baby Of Average Intelligence (a combination of her intelligence and his lack of it). And I, the author, the creator, the maker of these characters, would have my metaphorical hands tied behind my metaphorical back as my characters threw away their lives for people who aren’t good enough.

But am I so superior to them? Do I not make the same mistakes? Do I not like people who aren’t perfect? Do I not waste time on people who just aren’t worth it? I always thought that because I was like Phoenix, perhaps I would find someone like Kai. What if that’s not true? What if in the real world, there is only Mr Lacking In The Brain Department? There seem to be a lot of him in Cumbria, at any rate.

Funnily enough, I don’t think there has ever been a Mr Lacking In The Brain Department in any of my books. But there are other flaws, and some of my characters have them. The question is: what compromises will my female characters make? Will they choose someone who isn’t what they thought they wanted? Will they choose someone whose fatal flaw is something they hate?

It’s actually not really an issue that's come up in my books before, but it crossed my mind last night. I just couldn’t help thinking about what happens when the female character doesn’t have good judgement, and when the male character isn’t perfect. Do they end up together? How does that turn out? Is there such thing as a happily ever after in a situation like this? And what if these characters actually belong together?

Part of me thinks “No! They couldn’t possibly belong together! Not when he’s not good enough for her!” But what I seem to forget is that my female characters aren’t perfect either. They have flaws of their own. Yet people always choose them… Why should the male characters be different? Why do they deserve less love? Why don’t they deserve a happy ending?

Okay, in an ideal world, Miss Intelligent would end up with Mr Intelligent Compassionate Kind Perfect Guy, and Mr Lacking In The Brain Department would end up with Miss Not So Intelligent Either. Though if the latter got together, there wouldn’t be much hope for the human race (albeit a fictional one).

But what about in a fictional equivalent of the real world, rather than an ideal one? What happens to Miss Intelligent when Mr Intelligent Compassionate Kind Perfect Guy either doesn’t exist, or isn’t in her life? Does she settle for Mr Lacking In The Brain Department? Or Mr Extremely Flawed? Or does she become a hermit who lives at the top of Mount Everest?

Does Miss Intelligent actually accept the compromises that she may have to make, or does she think she’s above them? Does she truly believe that she can spend her life waiting around for Mr Perfect? It seems that Miss Intelligent isn’t quite as intelligent as her name implies, if she really thinks she can reside in the real world without living by its rules.

Me And My Love Of Traumatized Characters. (If You Have Any Doubt That I Am Horribly Cruel To My Characters, Please Read Consequence And Amend)

In the first novel I completed, there was a character called Maeve. Maeve was strong, she was tough, and she was fragile. An odd combination, right? Today, I realized that almost all of my favourite characters have that combination, they spring from the same archetype: the Archetype of the “Damaged” Character. In each book I’ve written, my favourite characters are those who have been hurt in some way.

And before anyone jumps to any conclusions, I am not a sadist; I do not love causing my characters pain. Well, I do sometimes, but we’re not going to talk about that right now.

The reason I’ve always been drawn to the Archetype of the Damaged Character is because those characters possess the most strength, and they possess the most vulnerability.

I’m currently writing my eighth novel, so I have created a lot of fictional characters in my time. But out of all of these characters, my favourite is Phoenix, from CONSEQUENCE. She wasn’t originally meant to be a Traumatized Character.

Originally, Phoenix was meant to be a fairly minor character. Her sole purpose was to be a bright, happy friend for Persephone. Yeah, look how that turned out. The moment I started writing her into the story, Phoenix changed from how she was in my head.

Some characters just have a story to tell, and they make sure that I tell it. And some characters don’t just make sure I tell their story, they plant themselves in my brain until they are 100 per cent certain that I will write what they want. Then, when the first two books in a trilogy are published, this joyful little character will helpfully suggest all the things I could have done differently.

In AMEND, there were two scenes that were my favourites to write. SPOILER ALERT! One of these was when Abynechka got turned into a warthog. Phoenix and I were both like “Justice! Yeah!” and the other scene was when Katya kills Jakov.

If I had to choose one favourite scene, I would choose the latter. Why? Because it is when Phoenix is at her strongest, yet her most vulnerable. She has to choose between almost-certain-death and her husband killing someone to save her.

Phoenix likes people to be perfect. This is ironic, given the fact that she is very far from perfect. Kai is the closest thing to perfect that Phoenix has ever found, and if Kai were to kill someone, it would mar that perfection.

For the first fourteen years of her life, all that Phoenix had was herself. And so, she is very protective of herself, and often holds people at arm’s length. But she loves Kai more than she loves herself, and so this scene is the hardest part of the book for her.

Phoenix has to choose between her own well-being, and Kai’s. And she chooses him. She chooses him because he’s her saviour, because he made her life better. And she chooses him because she loves him.

This scene is also proof of Phoenix’s growth throughout the trilogy. Had she been in the same situation, but at the beginning of CONSEQUENCE, she would have saved herself, without even thinking about it.

Perhaps the thing I like most about Traumatized Characters is that I can attempt to heal them. For example, by bringing in the character of Kai, I managed to heal Phoenix ~ or at least, start to heal her. She doesn’t really recover from what happened to her when she was younger until the end of TRANSCEND.

In the book I am currently writing, I have a character called Adelajda (Pronounced ah-de-LIE-dah.) She also fits into the Damaged Character Archetype. She’s a former slave, has anxiety issues, and is falling in love with her dead-half-sister’s boyfriend.

I’m currently writing the second book in a series of four. The first book was written in the first person of one character, Sage. But the second book alternates between three characters: Sage, Flynn, and Adelajda.

With the first book in this series, the characters weren’t in my head: at all. It kind of freaked me out, actually. I was like “what do I do? I’m so lost! I need my characters to tell me what to write”.

I eventually began to accept the fact that I would have to think of storylines myself, rather than relying on the apparently limited imaginations of my characters.

And then I started book two, and it was different. Okay, so my characters aren’t willing to give me any storylines, but they are being a little more vocal. Especially Adelajda.

Her original purpose was to be a very minor character that was in the first book for approximately two pages. Why does this appear to be a recurring theme? Why do my minor characters end up becoming protagonists?

Anyway, I liked her name, so I kept her in the story. Right from the beginning (or near-end, seeing as she didn’t come into the book until quite late on) I knew that she had a story to tell.

So I made her a protagonist in Book Number Two. And she’s actually the easiest character to write. My chapters are, on average, between two and three A4 pages long. I’ve only written one chapter from Adelajda’s perspective so far, but it was five pages long: double my average chapter length.

Two out of three of my current protagonists are Traumatized Characters (Flynn and Adelajda), and those are my two favourites. I like Sage, I do, but sometimes she’s a little bit…naïve, sarcastic, selfish, unthinking, and a whole bunch of other words that I can’t currently think of.

And she falls into my “Original Main Character Archetype”. The Original Main Character Archetype goes somewhat like this: naïve, lived a sheltered life, has never fallen in love before, thinks they can save the world, falls in love with one man who they get together with at approximately halfway through the first book, everybody thinks they’re a heroine who will change the crap-ness of the world they live in.

And, they are known as Original Main Characters, because they usually end up sharing the Main Character role with another, almost certainly traumatized, character.

I have had at least three main characters like that fit this archetype; two of which had another similarity: they both came from food-growing places (vineyard and Turnip Farms). Anyway, these main characters never fall into my Damaged Character Archetype. And, coincidentally, these characters are never my favourites. (The exception to that rule being a character that is in TRANSCEND, who I cannot talk about for reasons to do with giving away one of my biggest plot twists).

I think my overall favourite thing about the Damaged Character Archetype is that those characters have experienced intense emotional pain, and they have survived it. Which is why I tend to give those characters the more challenging storylines: because I know that they can handle it.