I Am Nobody

So, a few things have happened this week. First of all, my former girlfriend and current friend Kari has returned from active duty in Afganistan safe and sound. Although, being a nurse, she was usually far away from almost everything dangerous. She spent a day over at my apartment getting her mariokart fix, something she was etremely addicted to while we were dating, but hasn't been able to touch ever since shipping out.

I've also spent so long working 5-10 hours a day on Spires of Infinity over the last month or so that I'm having a hard time figuring out what to do with all my free time during my week off.

So, anyway, Kari and I were talking, and we got onto the subject of what sorts of books we liked when we were growing up. We're both fantasy and sci-fi fans, and she was complaining about how there are very few books in those genres with strong female characters. She loved the stories themselves, but while she was growing up and going through awkward teenage years, all the books she read were about boys or men going off on quests to rescue the weak and worthless girls taht do nothing but sit around waiting to be saved. It made her really mad that there weren't many books where the hero of teh story was a girl, someone she could relate to and had some of the same problems in life that she had to deal with herself. In short, it was a bit of a hit to her self-esteem.

So I have this story I've been thinking about, about a teenaged part time Grim Reaper who is the child of Death that has to fight off a supernatural Hunter that hunts down Reapers. I had originally thought to make the protagonist a guy, because, you know, that's easy for me to do since I happen to be a guy myself and I know what it was like to be a guy in high school. But the more I thought about it, the more I thoght that the story would work even better if the protagonist was a girl, which is going to be a hell of a lot harder for me to write believeably, but I think it's going to turn out well. Kari's complaints are what solidified my desire to make the character a girl, because she's right. There's not many stories in the genre's that the two of us like with strong female leads in them.

It's called "I Am Nobody" and it's a really short story, probably under 70k words, and geared more toward teens than my other writing. I also thought that I'd give writing in first person a try, which makes things even harder, because let's face it, I have never, and probably never will think like a teenaged girl, but we'll see what happens. I always enjoy a challenge, and I think that testing myself with a style of writing that i am unfamilliar with, as well as a main charcter that I don't have much in common with will help me to improve my skills as a writer. I got a really good first line for it. The first line of a story is usually very important. It's like the first impression a reader gets of you. This one fits the character and the story so perfectly that I've been patting myself on the back for it all week.

"They say girls are made of suger and spice and everyhing nice, but not me, I'm made of death and despair and things to beware."

I've written about five chapters of it since monday, and it's coming along nicely so far, but then, that's my opinion. I'll see what Kari says about how well I've written the character before I start posting bits of it on my website. I'm really only writing it right now to fill up the hours of the day I can't quite seem to remember what I used to do in before I started the second draft of Spires.