I Am Nobody Chapter 4 Draft 2

And so I'm done with another chapter of the second draft of I Am Nobody, and you can find it at the bottom of this page.  This one took quite a while to get done for several reasons, mostly that this one needed a lot more work than the previous four, mostly in the character development area, and because the week leading up to Thanksgiving at the Post Office is HORRIBLE!!!  The ads... dear God, the Black Friday ads... 

Mostly what I needed to do with this chapter was show how strained Mia's relationship with her mom is.  In the first draft I basically just told you that the relationship is bad, and never really showed you any of that.  In this draft I really wanted that to come out more, and I think I've done a much better job of it in this chapter than I originally did.  This is the chapter where Mia's relationship with her mom and her relationship with Steve are both established, and since that is very important to how these characters will interact with one another throughout the rest of the story, this is a very important chapter, and everything in it needed to be a lot more than what it was originally.  Plus, I needed to introduce some of Steve's personality quirks right off, and I failed to do that in the first draft.  On top of all of that, I wanted to show more deeply how Mia sees and feels about herself.  She's meant to be lacking confidence in herself, and that did not come across very well in the first draft.  And the way she sees herself ties in greatly with the trouble she's having with her mom.  It's a really convoluted relationship.  Mia thinks she's ugly so she doesn't even try to look pretty anymore.  Her mom feels guilty for how Mia looks, blames herself for it because she couldn't stop smoking while pregnant, and thinks Mia blames her for it too.  So she wants to dress Mia up all pretty to prove to herself that her daughter isn't suffering any ill effects from her smoking during pregnancy, and it makes her super angry when Mia refuses to let her.  And Mia herself gets super angry when her mom tries to do it because she sees it as having her nose rubbed in how ugly she thinks she is.  And with the tension of all of that, with the addition of Mia growing up and becoming her own person now rather than a child that does everything her mom says, causes them to strike sparks against each other at every opportunity.

And literally NONE of that was really evident in the first draft.  So there's a lot of work that needs to be done in incorporating it into the second draft, and since this chapter is the one that sets those subplots in motion, it needed lots of extra special care, which is why it took me so long to get it done.