My Brain Must Be Broke

My cluster headaches must have finally broken part of my brain.  I can think of no other sound reason why I’d decide it was a good idea to write a taciturn hero.

Taciturn – meaning he hardly ever speaks.

And me, who’d rather write dialogue than anything else.

Match made in a dirty, smelly sock, that’s destined to get lost in the wash.  Or not, if I can pull it off.  (Or rather up!  Hah!)

Yeah, okay, so skating around everything I write is some kind of insane challenge. Because like this writer crap isn’t hard enough, I have to go add mud and gore to make the mix harder to digest.  I was never the sharpest tool in the shed.

For White Balance the challenge was to write a cranky, depressed hero without making him so bloody boring he was unreadable.  For Detained it was writing a foreign location with some kind of authenticity, and a hero with violent tendencies who didn’t make you chuck your Kindle at a wall.  For Floored, I wanted a hero who lead with humour.  In Spark, I wanted to see if I could write a lead character without giving him point of view chapters and set in in another time zone.

I should get a life.  (At the very least more exercise!)

Anyway, now I have Mace and he doesn’t talk much.  Or rather he does and then I have to remind him less is more and edit all his words out.  He’s frustrating me, I don’t know how he’ll eventually read – or rather I do, at least hope I know how he’ll come across, but that would be telling.

So with Mace it’s write and cut, write and cut.

You know how I tend to write long?  My last effort was supposed to be notes to myself about what I would write if a certain request for content firmed up.  Notes, like dot points, get it?  Maybe a half dozen of them to remind me what I was thinking.

I wrote 2,800 words.  Notes, and I spit out a freaking short story.  This is not good people. This is overkill.  This is bad design.  This is novella fail.  As if I didn’t already know that. Desk Jockey Jam was designed to be 25,000 works.  Well, hello 40,000 and novella experiment design fail.

Mace and his tongue tied tendency, his reluctance to speak unless he’s being intense about something, might be my answer.  If I can make him work, (and that’s going so well, I’m over here stalling by writing a blog post) I can fix my tendency to write long by making all my heroes taciturn.

Because that wouldn’t make all the stories feel like a rehash now would it?

It’s either that or as fellow Escape Artist and romance scholar Sandra Antonelli says, “bring back the big book!”