Jayne ,'The Train Job'
A place for Buffistas to discuss, beta and otherwise deal and dish on their non-fan fiction projects.
Heh. Is this the novella?
No, I just meant the entire scene, and I'm going to write it. JP's POV - I won't be switching POV's during this series at all. It's all John. His voice. Where I live.
And the French police tend to think in 4-hour blocks. So I don't see them hold Bree and Dom for longer than that; for one thing, the band's manager, Ian, would be at the Board de Tourisme so fast he'd leave skid marks, threatening all the bad publicity in the world for the Festival.
Yup. For the first time, too, I totally pantsed it (i.e., flew by seat of) and it took off in a whole other direction. Very strange. And I'm doing my usual down-to-the-deadline thing, and my back hurts and I'm sick of these people. I want them happily-ever-aftered already.
Four-hour blocks, huh? Weird. But yeah, all the more reason not to hold them too long.
Hell, I live by seat-of-pantsing, and it gets very surprising, sometimes; I didn't expect Charlotte in Matty Groves to be the way she was, at all. And Mac is turning out to be an incredibly interesting,a nd different, character than I thought he would be.
But it's damned tricky when your editor is sitting there, tapping their wristwatch and going, ahem.....?
Cruel Sister was my first deadline ever. Hate the teeshirt.
I think deadlines are like an homage to the redballs of my previous life. need the pressure. Need at least a vague one or I might not do anything. My clearance rate's getting good now, even if I'm lacking the green that is supposed to turn cases from red to black.
I have a characterization question. How do I make a sympathetic character out of someone whose worldview I find pathetic/apalling? Particularly, using their POV.
Connie, think about attractive villains. What about Hannibal Lechter? He's a cannibal, for heaven's sake, but lots of readers/viewers were, if not precisely *sympathetic*, at least interested in him as a character, and not just as a villain.
We all want the same stuff, Connie. Love, respect, security, control over the environment, but Snidely Whiplash uses the tie-somebody-to-the tracks methods.
connie, how about the "there, but for the grace of God, go I" ploy?
Oddly enough, I can cope with evil. It's whiners and weaklings who baffle me.
connie, just make him - or her - human.
The thing about portraying humanity, in all its shades of grey - rather than the traditional white hat - black hat extremes - is that something will resonate somewhere.
The thing about a well-written character is this: they take the reader's face and turn it, not toward the light or the darkness, but toward the mirror. Something will resonate - and there's your sympathy.