I had a post written for Nanowrimo Week #1, but alas my computer ate it.  So I'm just going to start over.

Welcome to Tuesday, Week #2.  If you're on track, you should have at least 10K words right now.  If you don't, it's not over yet.  It's never over until December 1 comes around.  In 2009, I wrote over 20K in one eight hour time frame to finish at goal.  So, it's completely not over yet.

What distractions are you working with?

Mine are a little 8 month old boy who is starting to get his first cold, a husband working 12 hour days, and a growing irritation with my surroundings.  Those are minor.  Well, 2.0 doesn't think his cold is minor but it means longer naps and more writing time when I should be washing dishes.  The dishes can wait.

This year, I didn't map my plot.  I hardly researched.  I didn't even name my characters until I was actually writing them.  I've never done this before.  I always have a plan, a plot map, a character map, thorough research done ahead of time.  Last year that didn't work out so well for me and I hardly made it to 10k, giving up by my birthday on the 14th.

So I'm just going with the flow.  I know this novel will require LOTS of editing later on and I'm not committing to anything.  If I think one character needs to be in a scene, I write that scene.  I make myself finish the scene I'm on and only then do I stop (unless 2.0 is crying and then all bets are off).

We can get through this together!  It's only once a year after all.  Bring on week #2!

It only took me another year, but I finally finished Awakening!  It's ready to be proofed and I'm ordering that copy of the book tomorrow.  I can't believe it!

So what's happened since the last post?

My son was born on February 23, 2011.  Bringing a newborn home requires schedule adjustments and it took me and 2.0 a few months to get into a groove together.  Add to that a new work schedule for both my husband and myself and some...shall we say complications?  With all that, you have the perfect recipe for book delays.

But it's done now!  I can finally move on and work on Resurrection.  Now that's exciting!

Do you know how many times I've written Awakening?  Three times.  That's a lot for anyone.  I can finally move on with life and take the next step in the Chronicles Of Seven.

Fingers crossed for Resurrection by the end of the year!

Have you ever picked up a book by an author you have never heard of before and read the cover flap, gotten excited about the heroine of the story, only to find that the heroine was completely different in the actual story than you were led to believe?  Yeah, it's happened to me too.  Or you read a series and the heroine, who started out as a strong character who is completely necessary to the story, becomes a deflated wimpy version of herself.  It drives me insane.

In an effort to get rid of these kinds of stories, I want to let you in on the heroine.  Whether she's an ancient queen in a faraway land or a high school sophomore thrown into the middle of teenage angst, she's vital to your story and you need to make sure you treat her with the respect and delicacy she deserves.

I've worked with three heroines so far and I had to make sure that my notes on each were detailed and concise. I had to think past my feminist roots and look at each situation my heroine would have to face as if I'd never encountered the obstacle before.  With Rhoswen, my heroine from Prophecy, I had to seriously stop and think before I made her pregnant in Forbidden.  Would Rhoswen be excited about a coming baby or would she be terrified by the change in her life?  I weighed all the options before deciding what she would and wouldn't be.

But Rhoswen was easy.  I created her out of my life, twisting certain elements to give her more life and believability.  I knew her inside and out because she is me.  Working with Guin and Breanna proved to be infinitely harder.

Guin is someone that could not really exist, and yet she does exist in every single teenage girl on the face of the planet.  She wants her own life, to be able to make her own decisions and mistakes, she wants freedom.  I remember being in that stage of my life, but it was a long time ago.  I had to watch a lot of television and read a lot of *gulp* magazines to be able to figure out how to create Guin to be who she is.  But had I not done that, she would have been a flat, unbelievable caricature of herself.

Breanna is even harder to figure out than Guin is.  Breanna lives in the 1780s.  Sure, she's a teenager, but being a teenager in that day and age meant something completely different than it does now.  There's no one alive from that time frame to help me figure out what kind of person she is.  So I had to turn to books again and dig through history to find out what life was like for a girl her age in that day and time and try to adapt that information to the aspects of Breanna's character that wouldn't change with time.  Breanna is strong and independent, yet she knows when to listen to the guidance of others and when to fall back to protect herself and those she loves.  She is still under development, but she no longer confounds me.

If you want to create a heroine, you need to be sure that you know who she is and will become as the story continues.  Anticipate her actions and decisions, think through her responses.  Don't radically change her from one story to the next.  Instead, make the progression natural as she moves from one stage of life to the next.  Rhoswen was tough in Prophecy, hard and standoffish.  But by the end, she's a strong woman who finally understands what it means to love someone so much that you'd be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for him.  Then she moves from that stage of her life to a wife and mother.  I hope I made it flawless, but I'm sure I didn't.

Try not to make your heroine the opposite of herself from one story to the next, or even one chapter to the next, unless you're working with a character that has multiple personalities or is clinically insane.  It's always hard to read a heroine that you love turn into a coward when she wouldn't be or a bad guy when she's not being manipulated by the forces of darkness.

Finally, be prepared to edit like crazy when you're done writing the first draft.  We all create circumstances that make our heroine into something she shouldn't be.  Find those pages and fix them.  Comb through your heroine's life on those pages and make sure she is who she is instead of someone she isn't.  And take great care with her.  Remember, she may not be written as delicate, but she truly is.

In an effort to get more writing in my life (because it's just sad when your spouse writes more than you do and you're supposed to be the writer in the family), I decided to focus on my characters and start picking on a few of them (read: ALL of them).  So for the next few posts, I think I'll share what I've discovered with you.

I've talked about plotkillers and villains.  Now I want to focus on the sidekick.

Sidekicks aren't just for superhero comic books or really bad spinoff movies.  A sidekick doesn't have to wear a stupidly garish costume and rush in to save the hero's life in the nick of time.  Sidekicks can be cool and will end up being very important in your story as you develop it.

What kind of story would Lord of The Rings be without Sam, Legolas, Gimli, and the rest of the gang?  What kind of story would you have if you took Isabelle and Alec out of the Mortal Instruments?  The In Death series wouldn't be very good without Peabody, McNab, Mavis, and Summerset either.

So last night, while stuffing my face with Taco Bell, I thought about what my story would be like without Ulrich, Lincoln, and Chocon.  It would be pretty darned boring and I'm sure Seven would be dead right about now.

The sidekick is important because your hero has to have other people in his life besides himself.  Do you have people in your life besides yourself and/or significant other?  Of course you do.  In real life, they are our friends (and family, but family doesn't always count), but for fictional purposes, we'll call them sidekicks.

Without the sidekick, your hero stands alone against everything, good or bad.  There is no wingman watching his six, there is no warrior with a sword standing at his back.  There's probably no comic relief or deep, revealing conversations.  Your hero is in black and white.  Sidekicks bring the color (not gaudy latex color all the time either).

But if your sidekick is hokey, campy, or bland, you'll probably have a hokey, campy, or bland story (and if that's what you're going for, kudos to you).  Sidekicks have their own stories as well.  Dick Greyson has his own story line in Batman.  Stevie Rae has her own story line in the House of Night series.  Ulrich has his own story in Awakening and Lincoln had his in Forbidden.  Chocon is getting a turn later on.  It gives you the chance to make the sidekick real for the reader instead of a wallflower at the big dance.

My husband said to me last night that just because you call them a sidekick doesn't make them dorky.  I finally agree with him.  I had a hard time picturing Ulrich or Chocon as anyone's sidekick.  But now I see it.  Without them, my hero isn't the character I created him to be.  Remember that when you create a sidekick.  Your hero will thank you later on.

I'm getting a late start at this (I blame the recent dramatic dashes to labor and delivery for part of this), but here's my plan for 2011:

-Finish and release Awakening.
-Edit Prophecy to begin querying agents (my vernacular is off here, of this I'm sure, but it's been awhile for me)
-Get first draft of Resurrection completed.
-Hopefully finish first draft of OWR novel #1
-Successfully complete Nanowrimo this November!
-Complete notes for Scandal

I know I have a lot packed into this year and that I will probably not succeed in completing all these goals, but I'm going to try anyway.