I have loved storytelling for as long as I can remember, whether curled up before bedtime hearing tales from my father of princesses and conquerors or lazily spending summer hours under the shade of crab-apple trees, pages turning with the breeze from the swinging hammock. My childhood love of words, dreams, and language has created much of who I am, what I read, and what I write.

So if you are one who reads with an insatiable hunger for language, one who loves to paint words with your pen, or one who needs help expressing your message to your readers or customer base, welcome to my website. Thank you so much for stopping by.

Kris

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November 28, 2011

Years ago, I was working on pacing, and what better way to practice pacing in a book than to write a thriller? It began as an exercise and turned into a project I loved, but something just hasn't been quite right about it. My characters have been whispering behind my back, not letting me in on a secret, while I scribbled and edited and pondered their fates.

I loved my story's core, but something has been missing, something that turns this okay manuscript into the book I imagine in my mind. Looking for my answer this past summer, I stole my characters away from their Richmond, Virginia setting and plopped them down in an Anytown, USA high school. When struggling with issues of Eugenics and survival of the fittest, wouldn't it make so much sense for my story to be a YA? Yet my characters rebelled. They knew it wasn't right.

I tampered with point of view. Maybe my protagonist was wrong. Maybe the entire story shouldn't be a 3rd person narration centered around my male protagonist, a dry, at times apathetic twenty-something. Maybe, it should be written in 1st person from the point of view of a different character, my forty-something female co-star dealing with her husband's death. Yet she glared at me disapprovingly as I wrote her every word.

Then early this fall, over a dinner at my favorite Indian restaurant in town, my characters finally opened up to me - yes, writing can be a schizophrenic process. What led to this epiphany? My husband asked me a simple question:

"Why does your male main character whose been bothering you have to be male?"

In my best impression of J.D. from "Scrubs," with my head tilted to the side and my lips pursed, I pondered this solution. It seemed so obvious. It was a total rewrite, but I knew that was coming when I started my most recent rounds of edits.

I sat down at my computer, and all at once, my characters were more alive than ever. My female lead is feisty, spirited, with these purple fingernails that make her stand out in a crowd, and a kleptomaniac tendency rooted in her guilt over her father's accidental death. (Huh, I pondered, this is what he/she'd been keeping from me.) There is romantic tension where there wasn't any, and my villains have suddenly become darker and more deceptive.

It's taken a few years of edits, but perhaps this might be what my story's needed all this time. Curiouser and curiouser, eh? My queries are going in the mail soon. I'll keep you all updated.