Meet Dinah

Okay, so technically, if you've read this blog for a while, you've already met Dinah. She's the main character from PREMEDITATED, my first attempt at a contemporary YA novel (which is currently being shined to perfection by Super-Suzie).

I mentioned her here, and the original query was on Query Shark almost a year ago, here.

As I stutter and stumble through NaNo, blogging's been sort of falling off my to-do list on a regular basis, so I thought I'd remedy that by putting up a snip from Premeditated's first chapter. So, here you go; I hope you enjoy it.

"Your aunt and uncle really appreciate this," he said, rather than argue the point. "Having you around the house makes it easier..."

He let it drop, the way everyone did when they started to mention Claire. They all choked on her name, like she was ghost who hadn't quite caught on yet.

"Don't think you have to shoulder this, kid."

"I want to stay close in case something changes, and I don't want to go back to Ninth Street if I'm only going to be here a few weeks." That was the conservative estimate. Claire would either wake-up, or they'd stop expecting her to. "I'd just have to say good-bye to everyone again when Mom makes me come home. This way, I'll only be leaving strangers, and Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul didn't waste the tuition money."

"In a few weeks, they won't be strangers anymore."

Our truck melded into the flow of sedans and SUV's circling a paved drive with an ornate fountain in the middle. Stone deer and bear cubs played in marble flowers, while fairies poured water into a stream that emptied into the main bowl.

My old school had a flagpole and a dirt ring that, according to legend, held gladiolas at some point.

"People from a place like this will always be strange to me."

"I'm proud of you, D," he said.

D, which is short for Dinah, which is short for my great-grandmother, is my given name, and the first recorded instance of my dad protecting me from my mother. She intended to name me Diamond Rain or Rayne or Rhane – the spelling changes with each lament when she retells the story. Kind of like plain old Stacy became Stacia for the acting career that never was. Dinah, and all associated nicknames were rejected as too plain for her taste; they set off her allergy to the mundane. Thankfully, Dad still had a spine in those days, and filled in my birth certificate before her meds wore off.

Dad's hands tightened on the wheel again as he coasted into the "departing" area where other kids were climbing out of other cars. They gawked like they'd never seen a no-longer-quite-cherry red truck outside its natural habitat of the mechanic's shop before.

"Batter up, baby doll."

He may speak English, but sports analogies are my dad’s mother tongue.

"You haven't called me that since I was-"

"A real blonde?" he teased.

"Young enough to count my age on my fingers," I said.

"Same thing."

"Bye, Dad."

"It's nice to see the real Dinah again."

The real me, also known as the "me no one had seen since sixth grade", was how he referred to my choice of clothing before I actually had a choice. When my mother used me as her personal paper doll, and paraded me down every runway within a hundred mile radius.

"Don't miss your flight." I shut the passenger-side door as he shouted a last request for photographic evidence that I'd returned from the dark side to give Mom when he got home.

'Over my dead body,' I thought.

Lightning was welcome to strike me down – so long as Brooks went first.

There is Method to my Madness

Do not laugh at my drawing skills, I have a reason for subjecting you to them.

Meet Dinah, my avenging angel from Premeditated. (no, not a literal angel)

I quick sketched this over two years ago. Obviously, it's not finished or the cleanest image, and it's not exactly something you'd see hanging in the Met, but this is how I work a lot of the time. I'm a visual person, even if I have to create those visuals myself.

Sometimes, I do it with clip art, and make covers, like the one I did for Arclight a while back. And sometimes, I drag out my trusty Mirado #2 Black Warrior and a piece of paper. If I have a visual, it's easier for me to see the person in a story as real.

When I drew the picture at the top of this post, I didn't know who she was, only that she had a story to tell. I didn't even know her name was Dinah. In fact, I thought this was a picture of Johnnie, an oft-jostled foster child from another story. I tried to make her be Johnnie, but she refused to comply.

This is the point where people who don't write on a regular basis start to make strange faces and question my sanity, but if you're a writer, you know what I mean. Our characters are their own kind of real; they have dimension and texture, and they can refuse to do the things we tell them to do. They don't float on white paper (believe it or not, that piece of paper was white when I scanned it in), they inhabit a world of their own.

When Dinah first appeared as a character, and after I'd accepted that she wouldn't let me shoe horn her into the story I thought she fit, I did the usual writer things. I asked her questions.

Who are you?

She said she wouldn't tell me.

I asked her again.

She said she was a whisper in the dark.

I asked her again.

She said she was a secret sworn to keep herself.

Do I mean I literally heard a voice say these things? No. What I mean is that there was more to the character than the obvious, and it took me almost two years to get it out of her.

She's wearing a private school uniform, so I thought she went to private school, but again, she said "not really". Her posture's self-protective, which is where the part about secrets and being in the dark came from. She's obviously hiding something, including herself, in the way she's crouched behind the stairs.

On her hands, she wears fingerless gloves, not a part of your usual prep-school uniform. She's got that little chain around her ankle that had to mean something (it took quite a while to realize that was a bird on the end), and she doesn't have a tie on or bother to button the top buttons of her blouse. She's not a conformist, and knowing that added another dimension. I started to understand what she meant by "not really" being a private school girl.

Other clues came through. The haunted look in her eyes, the lack of a smile on her face, even the way the wind's blowing, like she doesn't feel it. This girl wasn't just hiding, she was numb.

If you read this blog, you know I generally write Paranormal / Fantasy, and it's usually a darker shade. So I thought "Ah ha!" She's a ghost! She's some poor dead girl who's got some unresolved issues. That's why she's sad!

I asked her if she was dead.

She said no, she wasn't, but someone was.

A hint of a name came through - Claire. I thought it was her name. Everything about her was wrapped around the name Claire, so it made sense. The early draft of the story has her named Claire, but I was wrong. I was looking at it from the wrong angle.

Her whole life is wrapped around Claire, but Claire isn't her. Claire's her cousin.

If you read the query I sent to Query Shark, you know I wrote it with the names under my original assumption, but now that I know better, a few things make more sense as I shift them around in the MS.

Dinah, for one (and this was an accidental bit of dovetailing) means Vindication and Judge. That's definitely the most fitting name I could have come up with for this girl. Claire means Bright White and Celestial - also perfect for the idealized way she sees her cousin.

The reason it was so hard to get a lock on who Dinah was, and what was getting me mixed up in the writing, is that she didn't know, either. She'd made herself disappear when things at home got bad, and then she disappeared again when she assumed the identity of a private school girl to avenge her cousin.

She was lost, hiding in the dark, and it was my job to find her.

That's your job, too, if you're a writer. You have to find your characters and coax them out into the light. You have to make them trust you enough to spill their secrets. And you cannot betray that trust by making them do things counter to their nature.

Maybe you draw pictures like I do, maybe you don't, but you should still have a vivid image of who your characters are -- and so should your readers. (See, I told you there was point.)

Non-Standard Query Structure - pt. 2

So....

Convinced that I was insane with my crazy query thing I wrote for Premeditated, I posted it to Query Letter Hell over at Absolute Write (which helped me shape it into the version I put here a few days ago). AW is awesome for helping knock the kinks out of things when they need a bit of an adjustment.

Then, still convinced I might be slightly less than mentally sound, I decided to send the query to Query Shark to see if the unusual structure was attention-grabbing for an agent or off-putting. I was half-expecting to end up as chum, but apparently the sharkly one liked it.

[ * insert embarrassing dance of joy * ]

She posted it on the blog today, but that's not why I've made another post out of the query. One of the comments she made was. QS said that before you do the "rule-breaking" query, you write one that doesn't break the rules.

I did that - seriously. The first attempt at a query for Premeditated was the standard couple of paragraphs following the plot and introducing the characters, but I didn't think it served the book as well as something a bit more sinister. So, for the sake of having something to talk about, I thought I'd show you the other kind of query for the same book.

Brooks Walden committed suicide the day he drove Claire's cousin to kill herself... he just doesn't know it yet.

^ This was my original "hook". It put the focus on the guy and girl and less on the cousin. In the new version, the dynamic is reversed. Dinah (the cousin) is the driving force, Claire is the one in motion, and the guy isn't a real person to her. She only uses his name because she has to.

When Claire agrees to attend the prestigious Lowry School, it has nothing to do with college prep, and everything to do with revenge. That's where she'll find Brooks Walden and his perfect life, and that's where she'll tear it apart one layer at a time - from his friends to his future. Sure, it would be easier just to kill him for his part in her cousin's suicide, but Claire's way will hurt more.

The Golden Boy's facade of perfection is shockingly thin, and easy to crack. A failed drug test here, a few not-quite-authentic photos posted to the right pages there, and the inescapable fact that rumors are powerful things. All the while, Claire plays the part of classmate and friend.

Just because she smiles, doesn't mean she's happy. Just because she laughs doesn't mean he's charming. Just because her stomach plummets when he worries over how well her plans are working doesn't mean she pities him. And just because her heart speeds up every time he comes close doesn't mean she's falling for his act the way Dinah did.

Yeah, right.

^ And this is how the rest of the "standard" query version would look.

True, the shorter version loses some of the story threads, like the fact that Claire's not evil and starts to regret the things she's doing, and the fact that she actually starts to play her part a little too well. It also cuts out some details, like Claire's transformation from Goth princess of darkness to Preppie pretty - all in the name of deception.

But, what the shorter version does, a lot better than this one, IMO, is get someone's interest. It's the core of the story, while the longer query is more set dressing. Hopefully, those who like the short query will see the extra story threads as embellishments to the core story when they read it.

(However, I think I'm flip-flopping the names. Dinah's the avenging angel now and Claire's the ill-fated cousin. Claire has a more ethereal sound to it, and Dinah's a bit harder. It fits better that way.)

I'll stop rambling now, and get back to editing so I can actually send the MS out...

:-P

Non-Standard Query Structure

Anyone who's serious about writing has probably already got the "basics" of query structure committed to memory.

You know how to address the agent (and how not to). You know to include word count and genre. You know to follow the basic main plot, in voice, and keep the agent's attention. You know to shoot for around 350 words, total.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before that I like to get my query locked down early on, because it helps me streamline the plot before all the sub-plot threads are added. To that end, I've decided to try something a little different than the usual two paragraphs of plot and one of personal info model. Whether it will work or not, I've no idea, but I think it gets the point of the story across, and hopefully it will stand out.



Dear Agent McAwesome:

One week ago, Claire's cousin Dinah slit her wrists.

Five days ago, Claire found Dinah's diary and discovered why.

Three days ago, Claire stopped crying and came up with a plan.

Two days ago, she ditched her piercings and bleached the black dye from her hair.

Yesterday, knee socks and uniform plaid became a predator's camouflage.

Today, she'll find the boy who broke Dinah.

By tomorrow, he'll wish he was dead.

Premeditated is a 60,000 word contemporary YA novel. Chapters or a synopsis are available on request.