Ramona the Brave

Getting back to the first book, I'm still working my way through Chapter 3. There's a lot of clean-up I need to do. Like I said the last time I discussed it, the opening bit needed a trim so I could get Kelly to the party faster, since that's where he meets Alyssa, which is the most important element of that chapter. So I looked at what I had and decided there was way too much dicking around. Now there's almost too much dicking around still, but it's much leaner and I think it flows better. Plus, it was pretty boring the way I had it. I don't want people tuning out or falling asleep on me.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I moved the story from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. Wait, hear me out. New Hampshire gives me a tighter playing field, in that I can concentrate most of the action in Lebanon, West Lebanon, and Hanover ... with occasional trips elsewhere, like Manchester. If I tried to do the story straight up in Mass, I'd have to deal with Greenfield, Bernardston, Turners Falls, Deerfield, Sunderland, Whatley, Northampton, Amherst, Hadley, Holyoke, Springfield, Westfield, Agawam, and Longmeadow. And that's just off the top of my head. There's probably more. And that's a bit unwieldy. I gave some thought to doing the same thing I did with Texas, which is take the area and transform it into a brand new entity. But I decided that worked a lot better for Emma's story than it would the rest of this story.

In getting Kelly out of his apartment I also introduce one of my favorite of all supporting characters: his cat Milo. This cat isn't based on any cat I've ever owned or known of, but I've really taken to him. I don't know if it's that he only barely tolerates Kelly, or that he acts as kind of a color commentary on any other person who comes in that apartment, but it's something. That latter thing is a bit I'm very fond of, and it's one of the several sneaky things that I'm doing in the story right in plain sight. Pay attention to how Milo reacts to Kim, Laurel, Alyssa, and Emma, along with a few others, and you'll get what I mean.

To get Kelly to the party we then meet Brian, who is based on a friend of mine from the FMC days. Since there are too many people I know with this same first name, I'll just call him Walker. I tried to stay faithful to the spirit of Walker and how he talks, although I might have exaggerated it a little ... but only a little. He's the guy who gave me the nickname Benitez in the first place. He came up with Ohio, too. I'm sure if he'd still been there when you started, Guinevere, he would have come up with something cute and funny for you, too. It's taken me a long time to fine tune the conversation between Brian and Kelly in the car, but I think the rhythm is really good right now.

Then at the party I had to cut a little chaff, but I was impressed that I came up with so many nice little details about the party. I made sure to keep all of those while I trimmed the other fat. The idea of what that party was like comes across, and that's really what I needed.

And then comes Alyssa. It took me three or four days just to get her approach from across the room down right, and even so I think I should give it another read-through, just to be sure. It's hard to nail, and this is something I really need to nail hard.

But then it gets easier. The opening conversation between her and Kelly, with the few tweaks I gave it, really really sings. It helps that I've de-schmucked Kelly a little in this version of the chapter, too. I wasn't real keen on how he came across in earlier versions, and it took a few passes to fix it. Alyssa, on the other hand, is tremendous. She's far and away my favorite character to write*, because all of her sentences just have an incredible energy that I can feel coming through my fingers. And she and Kelly have a great chemistry right off the bat, which makes the conversation so much easier to get through. I'm still only on the first leg of the conversation, while they're still at the party. The real meat of the matter comes at the conclusion of the chapter when they're alone in her car. I stopped tonight on a section that in the existing version is just glossed over, which I now think is a mistake, so I have to figure out how to handle that. That's tomorrow's assignment.

(*not including Emma in Chapter 2, which is a whole 'nother matter.)

I'll admit, Alyssa was a difficult character for me to nail down at first. But then I figured out the secret, and once I did everything fell right into place like rifle parts. That secret, and you can skip the end of this sentence if you don't want to know it, is to write Alyssa as though everything she says *might* be a complete and outright lie.

I probably won't spill every secret and trick that I know about these characters, though. Some of them need to show up in the details of the story.

It's going well. Very well.