Three stories, five books and not enough time

I realized today that I have actually started three separate books. I’m stunned. And worse, I don’t know what to write.

• Mermaids: This story revolves around a political turmoil in a mermaid world. Nessa is the youngest daughter of the king but wants to be queen. Under their government, she can be elected as queen.  However, it is only through the Adamahs, humans who have been changed to mermaids, that she can do this.  In this I have the election, and the result afterwards, and it’s really awesome. :)
• Intentional Accidents: This story revolves around two characters, a pirate and an assassin. They’re stories  interweaves into smiliar threads and storylines but I only know about the pirate. She is feeling lonely, hurt and wants off the pirate ship but doesn’t see a way to get off. A police man unknowingly gets on the pirate ship and encourages her to find her own way. The assassin is also tired of her life, wants out, but doesn’t know how to leave. I haven’t dealt with the assassin much, focusing on developing the pirate story, then the assassin, then merging them at the end.
• Mindskill: In mindskill, a doctor develops telepathy as an implant. He implanted his daughter without her knowledge, understanding that soon it would be a necessary skill to survive. He dies though before he can tell her, in an “accident” and she must discover the truth for herself, along with a plot to take over the world and a plan to keep those with this skill safe. This was going to be my shot at writing a trilogy (Which is a huge task, let me tell you.)

I’ve written 36 words of Intentional Accidents (9,455 words), 93 pages of mindskill (25,000) and 61 pages (16,000 words) of mermaids.

Here’s the problem: I like them all. I stopped mindskill because I needed to develop it more. I stopped Intentional Accidents because I needed to skim and I didn’t know how to. (I’m playing around writing the ending scene to that.) And I’m currently writing mermaids (which may not end up being mermaids, which makes me sad, but that is fact.)

I have every intention of finishing all of these. All of them are probably good. But how? I’m mean, seriously, I probably have enough to write about for three years (at least), not to mention that I  need to write synopses to send these books out, and I want to write Sagi’s tragedy (short story), and I’d really like to write one of the stories my friend and I write out (novel), and I’d like to edit Hope (or at least make a logical decision whether to toss it), and edit Giant’s Wife and–

*stops for breath*

I just have too many ideas I think. How do I choose?

 

changing faces

I don’t think I’ve never told you about my (someday written) novel, mindskill. So, I was going to summarize it and I don’t think I can do that. There are almost too many plots in my head right now.

The important part: Vanessa is a college student who comes home for a friend’s wedding only to be attacked. She kills the man but in a panic, she flees to avoid prison. Along the way she is told that she has a special skill of telepathy, whose development has thus far been a secret to most people.

She discovers that her father was (he died about six months from the beginning of the book) heavily involved in the development of the telepathy. It was he who gave it to her, because she had the plan of going into law enforcement as well. My idea behind her dad was that he was rather naive in his belief that by allow police to know immediately whether a person was lying or not would prevent innocent people from going to jail and enable better investigations, making the world safer.

Problems I ran into were two fold. 1) How would this be physically done? 2) Why would a kind father do this to his daughter? 3) Other complications that result for questionable things. (Including the fact that this intelligent doctor is very naive and I can’t imagine that happening.)

In part because of those reasons, I discard that plot in favor of writing short stories. But after a little bit of writing short stories, I wanted to write one of (the more rounded) characters in this story. So I started thinking about it and playing with it and I think I am going to have to make a serious change which I can’t say I like the idea of doing.

See, up until this point, I have been thinking of the dad as a good guy. Maybe slightly misinformed but generally good. If I change that, some things start falling into place.

BEFORE: Dad worked in a place generally like America (I haven’t decided if it is or not yet. I know. Bad writer.) the whole time, Vanessa and Dad lived in a nice house, and life was pretty good. Vanessa was busy at school doing school things and Dad was at work but everything was pretty much fine.

Dad insisted on privacy and gave it to his daughter as a gift.

NOW: Mom died (tragically) when Vanessa was ten.  I knew this and this has not changed. However, Dad, in overwhelm grief, runs away to work in, say, Africa, sending Vanessa to boarding school. While in Africa, Dad probably catches up with some people, and they discover telepathy and start selling it to countries as a weapon, playing very much of a double faced game, where they say that America has to buy it or else they’ll sell it to Iran, and telling Iran the same thing, selling it to both the countries with neither of them knowing it.

When Vanessa comes home for summer, Dad is generally detached and distant, but so much that he doesn’t a) realize where this will be heading to in the near future and b) actually give it to her as a protection for when these powers clash.

As a result, when she is finds out that she has the telepathy, she would have actually joined the group that her dad left behind her. Her dad’s death would have been a result of clashing opinions (between him, who wants to continue doing what they are doing, and Karl, who wants to start taking over the government and doing government reformation.(Yes, there is more to Karl; I’m not making him a faceless evil overlord. I’ve given that advice a bit too much.))

It’s drastic, I know. It would be hard enough for her without finding out that her dad was a traitor to the country and probably wanted by someone. But I think that sometimes we as writers need to let go of our preconceptions of characters and think outside of the box. Yeah, sure, we think outside of the box a lot as it is, but outside of outside of the box maybe?

It helps my problems is the biggest reason for this unexpected change. It makes sense too. It changes some things with my other characters, namely Isaiah, who works as a special investigation person, and changes a lot, but I haven’t really written much to change. Only some fifty odd pages that I planned on discarding most of anyway. Still… it helps a lot. And imagine this: you’re reading my book and you just find out that the main character’s dad is actually a bad guy! (And just pretend you didn’t just read this whole post first.) It would most certainly  be unexpected, which is what I always go for.

building blocks for telepathy

In a book I plan to write in the near future, I plan to create one of the early forms of telepathy. So, however much I hate my physiology class, I’m learning some very valuable things from it that would apply to a well to any form telepathy and that I will share.

Since telepathy would be similar to a general sense, it is fair to say it would function as a special sense like our sense of hearing or vision would.  In order for that to happen, there are some basic structures of senses that are a part of every single sense.

First, we need a way to sense the actual stimulus. In my example, it will be the stimulus of another’s thoughts that are somehow detected.

Next, we need it to travel someway to a processing center.

We need a processing center.

And then if we were to have people to communicate telepathically, like I plan, we need a way to send the messages again.

NOw, I’m not a brain surgeon or anything here. I’m just taking a physiology course. But let’s just say for example that brain waves can actually be transmitted through air. A special sense in our brain would detect them and send the message via our nerves to a special processing area of our brain. Once in the special processing area, it decodes the message, say, your thoughts, and so that I can understand them like speech. Then, I send them back either the same basic way or a different way. If we are going to do it like speech, it would be a different location. Actually the speech center would probably have to be tied in just because.

Does this make any sense?

Now, I’ve read a few books that have telepathics in it and sometimes they can move things mentally. I’m not sure if this is a vital skill or not for my story. But after writing down this whole process, this second function would have to be something completely different.

This is also where I get stuck. Because I can logically understand the concept of our brain being able to have a special receiver that receives messages from other people’s heads. But how would something be moved without touching it?  Logically, I can’t even figure this out, excluding most science, because our brain merely exists like a giant, self forming computer. If I ever figure it out, I’ll tell you. Maybe i’ll just drop that part, but it removes some really awesome scenes from my story.

one idea, many stories

So, on Sunday I wrote about my love story plot that I’d love to write. Much to my dismay, I’ve been toying with this idea ever since Sunday. I had an almost breakthrough that made me consider actually writing it, in spite of my swearing off of love stories. The idea is that I should just set it in a sci-fi setting, which I need practice writing in anyway,

Now, I have two ideas.

Just so you know the background: Arranged married goes wrong when the guy, who was rumored to be the guy, because he’s handsome, athletic and nice, has been in a very bad accident and is in some sense deformed, although it is not completely obvious. Girl is unaware of this initially, although would eventually find out as much.

So now, my two plots. Plot one from that is basically that idea. Guy was hurt, guy is slowly getting better so the girl doesn’t know. Girl finds out, freaks out and decides that she can’t marry him no matter what and blahblahblah. Well, as it turns out the other girl who has been caring for him since the accident has secretly fallen in love with him and somehow he finds out and he loves her and tada! Doesn’t end happy for the first girl but it ends happy for everyone else. (If I wrote this, it would be in the maid’s POV, just because anything else would be too difficult, and the other girl not as much fun.)

Story two: Guy’s a soldier; he got hurt; he comes home. Parents say while you’re covering, now is a great time for you to get married. And forget about all that silly soldier stuff anyway. It’s not like that was good for you.  Girl shows up, and it’s okay, although no one tells her what happened. (oooh, maybe he didn’t tell his family how badly hurt he was.) Problem is guy doesn’t want to marry girl because guy wants to still be a soldier and do good things like that. Girl doesn’t want to marry guy because by some twisted fate thing, girl has fallen in love with guy’s brother over the past year that they have been sending letters. Obviously, neither of them know the other’s dilemma, but if either of them decide not to get married, then it is worse than if they were found with a bunch of illegal drugs in their possession. Eventually, they find out everything and the guy breaks it off and runs off to be a soldier again, girl marries guy’s brother, and everyone is happy.

Both these stories could be written in a well-crafted science fiction society, so I would steer clear of the fantasy stuff I’ve been writing recently. It would actually be even more of a challenge to myself to make a believable reason as to why the society has arranged marriages and what their rules are. (Such as, if we are going to allow arranged marriages, we need to have a rule that there can only be a three year difference between the couple and so forth.)

I would like to write both these stories and I think, especially the first one, might be boring for me by the end. It’s not like Giant’s Wife where it ends with a BANG! Bu the second one might be a good thing to write because the second one I can incorporate into mindskill later on, as one of the characters. It would give background, society and so forth and might make for a much better story for me.

So, maybe I will write it. I’m not allowed to write anything else until I finish editing Dragon Slayers, which I have not done any of yet. Bad Abigail I know. But at least I can plot.

I WANT TO WRITE A LOVE STORY!

After finishing Giant’s Wife, I said that I swore off love stories until I’m at least engaged. Why? To summarize, because I haven’t even dated yet, so I don’t know how to exactly write about it.

This morning I came up with a brilliant plot  though.

Guy, we’ll say a lord, gets maimed in an accident. Very badly maimed where his whole side is at best useless. He lost part of his arm and can barely walk. But he doesn’t want anyone to know because he’s slightly ashamed and he used to be really athletic and now he’s lucky if he can make it from his room to his office. He’s getting better but it’s slow. This is a recent accident though

Girl was married earlier to him by proxy, had been postponed in coming to him for some unexplained reason on his part, and then finally arrives. That’s all I know. They get married shortly afterwards.

They get married.

But guy acts weird. Things like, he doesn’t ever rise or walk much in her presence. He always has a cane with him, which could be an ornament but it’s still weird for normal, everyday life. He also doesn’t show his hand/arm much (because he wears a prothesis) or uses it.  He also keeps to himself and never once sleeps with her.

Now, I don’t know where this would go much. My obvious solution would be that the girl starts to love the guy and then finds out and then is like, “Oh well,” but that’s so cliché.

The next idea was something along the lines of a servant of some kind who has been helping him recover for the last six months has basically fallen in love with him. He wouldn’t notice because he’s a nice, strong, lord, she’s just a common, and they are technically already married.

Then, the girl finds out, declares that she didn’t bargain to marry a maimed husband and wants out and he, because he’s feel all miserable, agrees and lets her go back.  At some point in time, the servant girl comes out that she loves him and he finds out that he loves her and–tada!–everything’s happy.

The only problem is I can’t write it because I refuse to write a love story like this. I would like to pursue this idea more or less and see where it goes, because it sounds interesting. (It actually sounds like something that my friend and I would roleplay if we still did.) It would be a blast. But I can’t because I am not going to write a love story.

Why does love have to be such a difficult topic anyway?

Maybe I’ll try to convince my friend to roleplay this summer.

On a different note, I’m trying to think of short stories to write for the characters in mindskill (besides Isaiah) because then I would get to know the characters better and I like that idea.

what do I really want to write

I began a novel about two months ago that I named for its working title mindskill. In some ways, I began it as a challenge to myself. It was, first of all, the first time I would try to write more than one book from one location; basically it would be a trilogy. Also, it would be the first time I would write a story with multiple POVs that did not appear to be connected. Yes, some people might know others but not everyone knew everyone (until the end).

Basically, the story was about these group of people who had seposomen. Seposomen is this mental ability that allowed these few individuals to sense the actual emotions of people, “hear” their surface thoughts, talk through their thoughts over a distance, and, as a bonus, move things without touching them. The original idea behind them was to create a better world, because with military uses, interrogations could be minimal. In police work, it could help people finding the person who is guilty without sending people to jail who are innocent. (Because you can tell if a person is lying.)

In the story there are several main characters: VAnessa, Isaiah, Eric, and Robert. (I said I’m horrible for writing men.) Vanessa is attacked for some unknown reason and kills the guy. Because of that, she feels for her life. Eric is probably one of her closest friends  and a reporter and is determined to find her, because he knows something is wrong. Robert finds VAnessa and helps her get on her feet and basically hires her to work as part of his anticrime unit, because the police aren’t doing a good enough job. (She is trained as a police officer, although she isn’t one officially yet.) Then we have Isaiah. Isaiah is part of a special investigations  unit and is investigating these interesting attacks against non-law abiding citizens. Some of the characters have seposomen and some don’t.

Why this is coming up is now that I’m winding down on Dragon Slayers, I’m thinking about what I might be writing next. Obviously, I could possibly try to write something along the lines of what I wrote with Samuel Brakborn. Even take one of the characters from there and toss them ahead or behind a few years and see what happens. I really want to write a real science fiction story, now that I’m finishing something more along the lines of a fantasy.

I dropped mindskill though because I didn’t think the characters were really enough. VAnessa is standing around dumbly and just letting everything wash over her. Oh yeah, her dad is dead. Oh well. Oh yeah, I have this weird thing going on with me. OH well. Oh, Robert isn’t letting me do anything. Oh well. Oh, I’m locked in here without a code. Oh well. I’ll just listen like a good little girl. It’s like she doesn’t care about anything.

Then, I was thinking about having a character called Jessica, who lives on one of the planet’s colonies and she is the perspective about how normal people view the seposomen, but I realized that I have that character already so after writing three or four scenes with her, I dropped her. I was going to replace her with someone else but this said character doesn’t have much of a role to play until the second part of the story, so I don’t know if it is a good idea to introduce him now.

On one positive note, I love Isaiah. He is fascinating and interesting and fun to write for. He has secrets and he has hurt and pain and I figured out how to express them well for him.  He has lots of secrets and because of that, he’s a blast to write for.

He is who I want to write about.

I’m not sure though if I can just write a story about him. I think that it would be a lot better if I write more than one character’s viewpoint. (Up until now, that’s pretty much all I’ve done. Shad is solely written  with one POV, minus one scene that I needed there to resolve several issues and couldn’t do it any other way.) I don’t want to just toss in Robert (who is technically the “bad guy” although the reader doesn’t know that right away.) because I don’t want it to be a case of the reader is reading this and finds out about what Robert plans on doing, and then sees that Isaiah figured him out, and then go back to Robert to see what he’s doing, and back and forth and back and forth until its boring and predictable.

I also am questioning the wisdom of starting such a huge project while I am in school. It is easy to say that I can write a 30 page story easily in a few months. With that, I”m not looking at it and judging it constantly and I’m going to get overwhelmed by the sheer impossibleness  of editing it. With what I’m talking about writing, it will be a huge challenge. (Then again, I could graduate, get married, move on with my life and who knows if I’ll ever write this.)

I really think I’m just going to have to sit down with the characters, interview them (because I love the results of interviewing characters) and then decide if the story is worth telling or not. Writing all this down, it makes it seem possible at least. (I wish I had a writing friend right now so badly though.)

Just a reminder. There will probably not be any post tomorrow and if there, is it won’t be until 8 or so at night.

a new road map for writing

I’ve always written novels. Well, more or less always. The few times I deviated from the normal of writing novels came during the PCLS writing contest (which, I just discovered, didn’t host their writing contest this past year. I would be mortified if that happened while I could still compete.), which I just wrote some short stories and figured there wasn’t any big deal.

But usually, it’s novels. I like the idea of complicated stories and having a chance to let things actually develop. Short stories seemed constraining and restrictive.

Then I started writing my most recent book. I haven’t been too certain on this one, trying a lot of new things at one time. Such things like writing unrelated characters so they meet together, and going with more adult characters, operating in normal society. (Up until now, my most realistic worlds involved a culture quite different than ours.)

As it would happen, I got stuck. It’s not that I don’t know what to do; I have the outline all written out in enough detail I can write. It’s just that I don’t want to write it. All excitement has been drained from the story. Moreover, unlike how it happened often before, I don’t have anything really awesome to look forward to. Lastly, my world seems to be falling apart in its realism.

Right about this time I finished Darkness Swallows. (Which, as my sister informs me, has several typos). The idea that I just wrote a story in three weeks was rather nice. Moreover, I have so many little ideas in my head, ideas that I don’t know what to do with in a novel but I know what to do with in a shorter story.

I’ve been thinking about this now for a good week or two and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to write some short stories right now. First of all, with being in school for nursing full time (and overloaded the boot) I’m going to be busy.  I will not always be able to write. Secondly, I can spend quite a bit of time focusing on the elements of plot, character development and setting. I can then use these elements to later create my universe. Thirdly, I don’t have any good ideas for novels. None. By doing this, I might get some really good ideas for novels that I never would have thought of otherwise. Lastly, quicker feedback. To ask a friend to read a 120 page novel is huge. To ask  a friend to read a short story really quick, then they might be more likely to do that.

I’m not going to pretend to be a short story master when I’m done. My goal is merely to hone in my skill in story telling while doing it in bite size pieces. I’m rather excited about this actually because, like I said, I have a lot of ideas and I’ll have a chance to try a lot of things–like political books. I’m not great with politics, not enough to write a satire like the famous authors do, but I might know enough to get a few of my opinions across.

So, I suppose to give you a sneak peek at what I plan next. Keep in mind that I don’t know a whole lot about these characters yet, so we’ll probably be changing it some.

Natlie lives in Basham Heights, a small town nestled in the center of the Dragons’ Nest. Dragon attacks are a way of life for her and the fellow townfok. Over the past generations, they have developed methods of protect their town, farmland and ultimately cattle from attack.

All these changes when a dragon slayer comes down from the mountains and reports the vast decrease in the number of dragons. Plans are made to prevent the dragons from being hurt. Natlie can’t imagine though that this is a good idea. AFter all, the dragons have killed so many people. Moreover, Justin, another dragon slayer who Natlie housed with her family when they banished the dragon slayers from town, is convince these changes will bring only harm. Natlie finds herself unsure about what to do, torn between what has happened and what should happen.

Working title: Dragon Slayer. No clue on when I’ll let you see this though. My goal is to write one at best once a month and at worse one a quarter. There will be something else soon too, that is pretty much really awesome pure randomness.

merging characters

I saw something about how you want to keep characters down in a story. If you can show that Jane is overwhelmed with her parenting responsibly with five kids as well as ten, have there be five kids. If you only need one sidekick, don’t have two. (But don’t strip things down either. Just writing now, it might be interesting to make it look like our heroine, Jane Doe, has two sidekicks to help her out, Bob and Jessica, when in reality Bob becomes a distraction because of her growing interest/love for him, and becomes more of a separate plot device.)

I realized today that I might have a situation where I can move two characters together. See, I created Jess who lives on a colony planet. Much of her purpose is to show why people with seposomen can be feared. (Seposomen is the special skill that some people have, both hero and villain.) She is also there to watch two of the leaders of the seposomen circle decide they are going to move anyone who wants a safe place from the home planet here. (One of the characters in that story is MIles, who plays a very important role after Part/Book 1.)

But in all honesty, her plot is very poor. There is only one scene of hers that will be interesting or good, and that is when her ex-boyfriend comes in and tries to shoot up the restaurant, and Miles stops him. I’m still struggling for a good story with her, that will keep readers from moaning that they have to read about Jess again.

On the other side of the system, at the home planet, I have Eric. Eric is a friend of Vanessa and has been since grade school. He just got married and, at the end of the book, his wife is going be basically killed by the people with seposomen (but the bad group of them.)

All this is in accordance with prophecy.

Not really. I just thought of that line about how to annoy people, by ending things with “in accordance with prophecy.”

Eric and Jess are the only non-seposomen characters in the whole story, minus third-ranked characters, such as Lucas, and other one-scene people. Both of them, by the end, will have a reason why to dislike the people with seposomen. Eric, because, obviously, his wife was killed. Jess, because the guy with Miles decides to hold her captive after she finds out about seposomen. (This isn’t public knowledge at the end of Part 1.)

So can I merge them?

I’ll admit, I don’t know everything that the characters will be doing. I was thinking something along the lines of when Vanessa is captured later on (oooo), Jess could be the one to actually set her free. And Jess  could show that some people realize that seposomen, in the hands of the right people, is safe and go back to the colony when Karl goes semi-narcissistic.

But I can just as easily have Eric both those things, with saving Vanessa because he is friends with her and believes her when she says that she had nothing to do with blowing up the subway. And I can have him also go back to the colony with Miles in the end.

The only problem is I really want to do that scene with the guy in the restaurant, but I think it would be more effective anyway to write something from Miles’ POV, including that scene, than to write it from Jess’ scene, while she’s trying to run. Or, I could possibly have Isaiah do it randomly, but that will probably be too much, since he’s already said to be really awesome and by having Miles do it instead of Isaiah, readers would then see that Miles is just as good as Isaiah is, if not better.  (Or I could have Miles and Isaiah do it together at the end of the story, but that’s probably not as good of an idea, because it’ll be such a distractor.)

It’s times like these that I wish I had a writer friend. I don’t, not really. And no writing group either. It’s just me, trying to figure everything out on my own. But, surprisingly, these blog entries are actually helping a lot. This is two for two now that I think I know what I’m doing.

So it looks like the key then to coming out of writer’s block–freewrite the problem and it’ll come.

character’s emotions

I read in a magazine recently that one of the largest problems is that the main character has absolutely no emotions and is hardly a well-rounded character.  The supporting characters in this situation might even be the most 3D characters ever written but the main characters are just blah. Who is going to care about blah main characters?

I ran into this problem recently. In my new book, working title mindskill, I am using quite a few characters from different areas of the world, some who may not even know each other. (The last time I wrote a book with a multi-character POV, Richard, Hope and Senior all lived in the same place and worked together and all that, with only people not knowing Ka’yam until the end, so this is something new for me. Shad only had Shad’s POV except for one little section.)  Of most of them, I understand their motivations and personality very well, or can at least relate to them. For lack of better terms, (and I suspect some other writers can understand this) the characters are talking rather easily for me.

That all stops with Vanessa. For the reason that I don’t want to have to come back someday and clean this up, Vanessa is a very important character, especially as the story ends. Some of her story will be very cool and rather important. I just don’t understand her though. When I think about what she would feel, I just see this giant void of emotions.

I’ve tried putting myself into her situation. She’s been rather independent now, but loved her father. Her father’s dead though and she just had the first real experience  with him not being alive (since she’s been away at school thus far.) So when she was at home, it was like when I’m in a totally quite house and just waiting for someone to come in, although I know that they’re still far away.

Suddenly, she kills someone for the first time,  a total accident, and she freaks and runs. After a few days of living in the streets (which I so wish I remembered more of what I learned on Urban Ex), she runs into a man who tells her that he’s running this whole private business to stop criminals. He says that she can come and work for him, so she does.  (She doesn’t have a lot of options and she is trained to defend herself. She was going to be a cop.)

But it turns out that he isn’t exactly what he said he was and she doesn’t really have schizophrenia like she thought she did. In reality, the problem that she’s been calling schizophrenia is really something called seposomen (it’s basically my own version of telepathy, but I don’t like that so I called it something else.). She’s had it since she was sixteen and no one has told her. Why not? Did her father know? (Well, I know he knew because I (and the reader) would know that her father was the lead researcher in seposomen, so he had to know, but she wouldn’t know that.)

My first thought is if she critically evaluated this, she might realize that her father did know it and… and it just dawned on me that she might try to contact some of her father’s associates. (That might give her enough to be tense enough that it sets things up for the ending, since she can’t get ahold of anyone. )

But how do I show this without telling it? She knows almost no one there except Karl, so it’s not like she can talk through these emotions. And Karl, although I’m trying to elude that he might be romantically interested in her (he’s not, but that’s okay), she doesn’t trust him enough to spill everything out like that.

On top of all this, I also realized that Karl doesn’t have funding and I don’t know if I want to have two rich kids involved in this, although it might work. And… I’m still trying to figure out another character’s plot. Maybe writing this will be harder than I thought. I probably should just stick to stand-alone books after this. :) (Who knows? Maybe this will end up being a stand alone book anyway, just because of it’s shortness. I am at 22,000 words though and I’m hardly towards the midway point.)

male characters

I find myself writing a lot with male characters. I’m not sure why. Maybe in part because I do think that  men are more superior  in some areas, namely, the areas that I write. I don’t not have female characters; I just do a lot with male characters.

(Just to give you an idea: in Hope–Senior, and Richard. Female–Hope and maybe Agatha and Lisa. In Shad–Shad, Kontyo, plus a number of minor male characters such as Vaul, Emin, and Dr. P.. Female, Aurora and Kayla. In codename mindskill–Isaiah, Miles, Karl, Lucas, Eric. Female, VAnessa and Jessica. In Kontyo–I think I’m going to only have one brief appearance by a female. Giant’s Wife–Heddwyn and Pauldor (although I do have Jacey and Eva to offset them.))

I guess part of me figures that so long as I stay away from love stories (which I’m not doing with Eric), I should be fine with writing male characters. I think I view female and males as basically the same. Which I find strange because I was reading that Woolf found there to be very little difference between male and females.

I don’t know. But I do find this fact that I write male characters so often slightly disturbing, because maybe there is more that I don’t know about.