Step 51: Confess (Day 4/5/6)

I didn't keep up with #authorconfession over the weekend because I was too busy being complete and utter Final Fantasy XV trash (apologies to my Twitter followers).

I REGRET NOTHING

But I'm back at it again with the white vans, so here are my answers for the last three days worth of questions, compiled into one blog post for all two of you who might be reading this!

Day 4. Which celeb would play your MC?

The narrator of my WIP is sort of an everygirl, and is essentially just an avatar for the reader to project themselves onto. To that end, I spared most of the details of her appearance so that the reader might conjure up their own image of her.

The secondary MC, on the other hand, has a very specific set of physical attributes defined in the novel. I described her as a strange beauty with "elven-like features that were angular yet delicate" and hair so red it was "as if Hades himself had lit a pilot light over her head and had forgotten to turn the stove off". I've cycled through various celebrity comparisons in my brain over the course of writing the book, and I think I've finally settled on the love child of Tilda Swinton and a young David Bowie.

They're kind of the same person anyway TBH

Day 5. Be honest: How's your world building?

One of the earliest critiques I received from a beta reader was my weak world building. The setting of my current WIP is a small town in New Hampshire, and yet I had done nothing to really describe the uniqueness of life in the far Northeast. Sure, there was snowy weather in my book, but exactly what kind of snow? Was it the fluffy kind that feels chewy when you eat it, or the miserable wet kind that leaves residue from the salt-treated sidewalk on your nice leather boots? It took this Southern California native going to New Hampshire over the course of three Christmases and strolling around rural neighborhoods in sub-freezing temperatures to fully absorb the nuanced details of what living there was really like.

It's kind of like that.

So I can confidently say that my world building has improved a great deal from my earliest drafts. I may not have invented a whole new Planetos à la George R. R. Martin in A Song of Ice and Fire, but at least my teenagers are now eating lunch in the dead of winter inside an actual cafeteria building instead of outside on a quad because that's all I knew when I was in high school.

Day 6. How do you show diversity in your work?

We're treading dangerously close to spoiler territory, so I'll have to remain tight-lipped on the details of this answer. Admittedly, my cast is almost entirely white (an unfortunate byproduct of it being set in Caucasianland, NH), but I hope to rectify that oversight in future novels. What I can say is that this book is firmly rooted in the LGBTQ+ genre, so hopefully some underrepresented voices will find enjoyment with my story.

It's gonna bE FABULOUUUUUUUUUSSSS