Oh the days when it was just me and the cat. I wish I’d had the motivation then to make my author career a thing. I could have accomplished so much more.

Writing time is at a premium when you have a family. Kids have this annoying way of being able to stay up until 1am and still waking up like everything is normal at 7am. It seriously cuts into my alone time.

And even though they would easily spend a full day playing video games and watching tv if we let them, especially now that it’s summer, round about noon my conscience starts to get to me that I’m letting their brains rot for my own purposes and we have to get outside.

To top it off, my oldest can read now, so writing sexy vampire smut scenes now has to happen in secret, like I’m at my day job and the boss keeps coming up to peek over my shoulder. Have a new tab open, my friends. Get ready to toggle quickly.

Even though I long for the freedom to spend a whole bloody Saturday challenging myself to write 10K or some other delightful goal, the fact that I can’t is actually probably a good thing. It means I’m motivated to steal every minute that I can — furiously scribbling on a legal pad during my lunch break at work, breaking out my laptop during the short and glorious minutes that the children are entertaining themselves without yet having resorted to violence, getting up out of bed for half an hour before the rest of the house on the weekends, even though sleep is lovely, to at least try to get a few sentences on the page.

Is it slow going? Yes. But every time I make the choice to spend time with my novel, to devote time to pursuing this goal, I gain momentum, I remind myself that this is a thing that’s important to me and worthy of my time. And even one new sentence is one I didn’t have before.

So even though I can watch authors on Authortube and start to feel the teensiest bit jealous of those who seem to have all the free time I want, I also know that jealousy is nonsense and we’re all just working with what we’ve got. It might take me a little longer to get my books written, but they’ll get there.

One freakin’ word after the other.

One of the biggest problems I’ve had with my WIP since the beginning was not liking my Female Main Character (FMC) very much.

female character

I LOVE my Male Main Character (MMC), he’s a deviant and a sarcastic ass and I love him. I love my FMC in theory, but as soon as I start to set her down on the page, the story I’ve set for her turns her into a sort of weak-willed, stereotypical two-dimensional female character who has things happen to her and around her and is the plot point for the hero’s character arc, and I hate that. But, I do still want the story to revolve around her time as a captive of the main baddie, so, how to make this work?

I think it was while I was driving yesterday that it came to me — what would make her more interesting?

Funny how massive lightning strikes of like, basic common sense, come to us out of nowhere and seem so deep and profound. 😉

What I crave in my female characters, what I love about the ones I love, is their strength and their agency over their own stories regardless of whether they’re queens or slaves. And what I hated in my FMC was that she didn’t have any. She was sassy and snarky to match my MMC, but she had no agency. She was making no decisions about her own story. She was being told what to do and having the story happen around her and not because of her.

The flash of inspiration in the car showed me how to fix that. Up to now, she has been the human consort of our MMC vampire. She’s a hedonistic party girl, just like him, and she also functions as the lure for the humans the vampire feeds on every night. She does this willingly. But at the end of the day she’s also just a kept pet, a mistress in a gilded cage who in many ways lives at his mercy. And I wanted her to have more strength.

How to make her more interesting? What if, instead of just being a party girl who gets other women to party with her, she was overtly a madame. A freelance sexual coordinator. It would be quite a change from what she had been, but also totally in line with her character all along. It gives her agency over what she’s doing and more power to make choices over her own story.

In theory I liked the idea of her living as his kept mistress but in practice I realized it was making her a weak character, at least under my pen, and I think exploring this new idea will help me flesh her out into the character I want and need her to be.

questions

What are your favorite things about female characters in stories you’ve read? What are things that you hate? Does your character have any of the traits you can’t stand? If so, how can you shake things up?

Tag: amwriting

Weekend Writing Schedule

The reason I didn’t like my main character

questions