The Antihero's Journey

There's another session of Camp NaNoWriMo in July, and oh my god, I'm so excited!

That right there, that's why I keep doing NaNo. If I ever stop looking forward to it, then I guess that's when I'll stop.

So as it stands, I'm planning on doing my Subterranean Detective Romance for July. That gives me a month to finish what I'm doing and get some kind of plan going. There's a lot of research I need to do for this. I have a whole list of things I need to look into. I think I'll get into that next time.

Today, we're still working on that silly train story. I wrote about 860 more words last night, so I've nearly doubled what I already had. If we're going by my little plot arc thing, I've covered the first four plot points, and am about to reach the fifth.

It's been interesting, this antihero business. I mean, usually your heroes are… heroic. Moral and noble, albeit with their flaws. Jake Barlow is… well, he's an asshole. Also a murderer, but I feel like that's beside the point. Well, I mean, he doesn't have much of a soul, on account of all the murdering, so that probably contributes to his attitude.

That was an issue I had in the first draft. He was supposed to be this indifferent sociopath, but he came off more as just a guy who happened to kill people. I've been trying to fix that this time around.

So there came the point in the story where he meets Evie, the only other survivor of the mysterious Entity that eats souls or whatever. And this happens:

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m getting the hell out of here.”

She crawled out from under the train car. “Can I come with you?”

He shrugged. “Do what you want.”

She scrambled up and started walking beside him. “I’m Evie,” she said, offering a hand.

“Don’t care,” he said and kept walking.

And that's the point where I think I started to figure the character out. It started the period of the story where she's just this thing that keeps following him around. And it's been a lot of fun to write. He's this guy who could definitely mess somebody up, she's just a kid, and she's decided the safest place to be is with him (she doesn't know he's a convicted murderer yet). And he wants nothing to do with her.

Something creaked upstairs. Jake’s gaze drifted toward the ceiling. He turned around to find Evie right behind him.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“Stay here,” he said, walking past her toward the stairs.

“Is it safer here?”

“Doubt it. But you’re noisy.”

I'm actually enjoying writing this right now. Which is good. There's nothing worse than having a story to finish and it feeling like a chore to write. The resulting writing gets bland and lame. It's not fun for anyone, writer or reader.

So I should probably get back to it, instead of just talking about it all day.

I'll see you Tuesday.