After 5 days of writing, I’m 10,000 words in. I’m quite enjoying the process of watching this book unfold, but I have to say that some days have been a lot harder than others. Part of that may be unavoidable. I know that there’s a bunch of stuff I need Anna to discover before the plot can logically move forward. I know better than to just infodump it into the narrative, which means I’ve got to actually show Anna learning this stuff.

Frankly, it’s hard work coming up with interesting ways for Anna to discover a whole bunch of stuff about her father that she never knew, but which also supports the mysteries Anna will then set out to unravel. It would be all too easy to end up sabotaging the choices I need her to make by revealing the information in the wrong ways. So that takes time.

I also made a decision to write this book in first person POV, which is a departure for me. I’ve always been somewhat afraid of trying that, but something about this premise and the character of Anna made me feel like I ought to try it. I think partly I knew that some significant parts of this book were going to hinge on internal conflicts and Anna working out the ramifications of the identity crisis I threw at her in chapter 1, for which first-person is a natural choice. The alternative, doing it in limited third person with a whole lot of inner monologue, somehow wasn’t as appealing to me.

It’s going ok, I suppose. I’m happy with what I’ve written so far, even though I don’t yet feel qualified to write Anna in that way. I don’t really know her well enough yet that I feel I ought to be allowed to put words in her mouth and thoughts in her head like that. I expect that by the time I get to the end of the book, I’ll have a much clearer and stronger feel for Anna’s voice, which means I’ll have to go back and re-write the beginning to make it match. But that’s ok. It will be worth the work.

Still, I’ve had some fun surprises along the way. Like I said last time, the stuff that comes to you while you’re writing is almost always better than what you could ever think of ahead of time, and that’s been true for me a couple of times already.

Anna

The biggest surprise has been to find Anna suspecting her mother of having murdered her father. That was a good one, because with the set of information she has at hand, it’s actually not a bad theory. It can be made to fit a whole bunch of other stuff Anna is wondering about, too. So I had to run with that for a while. It was a fun digression, and I suspect I’ll probably end up keeping it in the final draft, but ultimately it wasn’t too difficult for Anna to spot the places where that theory doesn’t hold up.

I haven’t learned yet whether Anna swears a lot because she’s actually tough and brassy, or because it’s a defense mechanism. That one’s still up in the air. What I have learned about her is kind of interesting, though. She’s impulsive. We knew that already. But the curious part is that although she knows she’s that way, she can sense it, she nevertheless lets herself give in to her impulses anyway. This may well get her into trouble someday. We’ll see.

Peter

Peter is Anna’s father. He isn’t personally in the novel, having disappeared some fifteen years prior. But he is definitely taking on a persona of his own through the material artifacts he left behind. Anna was only five years old when he left, so she is becoming re-acquainted with him by going through his stuff, at the same time as I’m learning about him at all.

He’s an interesting guy. He was a huge Roy Rogers fan as a kid, and as it turns out Roy Rogers is what got him started collecting comic books. Comic books are a central theme in the novel, and while I’d always had that as part of the premise, I had never given much thought to how, exactly, Peter got started on collecting them. Turns out that the King of the Cowboys had a comic book series back in the day, and so those were his “gateway drug” into the larger world of superhero comic books of the late 50s and early 60s.

The other fun thing about Peter is that he wasn’t the kind of guy who would just tell you what he thought. He would, rather, ask you rhetorical questions that had only one possible answer. Like, he wouldn’t say “ew, that looks disgusting,” he’d say “oh, you’re not really going to eat that, are you?” This has been helpful, because even though Peter himself is not around in any of the scenes, Anna does have a picture of him that she talks to. And sometimes, in her head, the picture talks back. Not literally—she’s not crazy, she knows it’s just her imagining what he would say—but still it has become a useful device for creating some interaction, for building an emotional relationship, between someone who is there and someone who isn’t.

That’s not something I ever planned, but boy am I glad that picture turned up when it did.