I am having such a ball writing Girl from Mars!

Yeah, sure, I don’t know what’s going to happen, after the next chapter or so. But the heroine, Fil, is truly a hoot. Also, I’ve had to make up the history of the science fiction comic she draws for, and drop in tidbits of episodes from it, and that is lots and lots of fun.

I keep on having to read bits aloud to my husband.

Remind me of this, will you, when I get to the suckage point?

Because I am being an internet whore (hooray!) I’m a guest today on Jennifer’s Random Musings. Pop on over for a chance to talk about beautiful men and also to win a copy of One Night Stand!

I said I’d blog a little bit about my process for plotting a novel. I’m not much good with plot as a whole; I tend to find that the characters provide the action, so my main job is figuring out the characters. Yesterday, I wrote down a whole bunch of questions about my main character, her three best friends, and the comic book she works on. I’ve answered some of those questions, but I’ve got more work to do on it. As I answer the questions, often scenes pop into my head.

In the early stages of structuring a novel I need to think about how the themes of the book work, and how the secondary characters reflect the main character. Like, for example, in One Night Stand, the characters of Eleanor’s relatives, Sheila and June, reflect issues that Eleanor herself is going through, about change, parenthood, and the nature of responsibility. I developed them and chose what happened to them purely because of how these things would affect Eleanor.

Girl from Mars is about loyalty, and I’ve begun to figure out why and how loyalty affects Fil (the heroine) and Dan (the hero). Now I’m going to do some work about what loyalty means to her three best friends, Jim, Digger, and Stevo–and also what it means to the character in the comic book she draws, “Girl from Mars”.

This should, pretty much, give me the plot! For example, I’m suspecting that Digger has a secret about his family, a very good reason why he doesn’t owe his father any loyalty at all. But something traumatic will happen that tests how he feels about his father and what kind of person Digger is. Of course Digger is a secondary character, so I need to think about how and where I can place this traumatic event so that it actually tests the protagonist Fil’s emotions and sense of herself, too.

I really find that choosing themes in this way, or an issue I want to explore in various permutations, helps me develop the story. Other themes come in, too, and it all gets complicated, but having a general “big idea” is really useful to me.

I gave in my revisions for Honey Trap yesterday, and spent the afternoon unsuccessfully shopping for a frock for the RNA awards lunch on the 4th of February. I figure as I’ve been shortlisted this is a good excuse for a new dress. Why is it, though, that when you don’t need a new dress you see loads and loads of them that you love, and when you do need one, everything is either black or stupid?

Anyway now it’s time for me to get back to my next book, Girl from Mars. I opened the word doc this morning and had a read and I am happy to say that I just LOVE this heroine. She is absolutely hilarious and also very sweet and (like all my characters, strangely enough) completely obsessive. I laughed out loud several times. So this is all a really good sign. If only I knew what was going to happen.

I’m going to spend a few days brainstorming and diagramming.

I’m having the most awesome time doing research for Girl from Mars, my next book, about a female comic book artist.

There are three books beside my bed. One is William Eisner’s classic Comics and Sequential Art, an examination of how comics work. The other is the fun and awesome Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud, which is an analysis of comics, drawn/written as a comic book. I got the Eisner out of the library, but I bought the McCloud, and I’m glad I did because I think it’s given me some of the central metaphors for this book. Comics work differently than plain text; they have a vocabulary and grammar of space and time and image that is unique, and gives me an insight into how my heroine’s mind works.

Beside that is Batman: Dark Victory by Joseph Loeb and Tim Sale. I am a Batman fan and when I got the idea for Girl from Mars I went to the library and got out every Batman comic they had. This is one of my favourites so far (except for the weird, weird gothic Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, which I own and have read so much it’s falling to bits).

My internet research has been on Batman (of course), but more on 2000AD and Dan Dare, because the comic Girl from Mars, which Fil draws, is a British comic. Which gives me another theme, differences between the USA and UK, which is something that I’m interested in for obvious reasons.