How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

Seriously, look how good this cover is!        In 2018, I self-published a book that I've talked about on here for a long time -- The Fifth.  You can buy it here . Since then (even before then, honestly), I've been working on a sequel, which is in final stages.  And since these are trying times, indeed, I thought a way to spur myself to really complete the sequel is to release it serially here at my old blog.  So that's what I'll be doing. I plan to post excerpts of the sequel to The Fifth -- The Fourth Horseman -- two or three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, starting Monday, March 23rd.  Some of the posts will be the actual content of the book, but I'm also planning on doing some posts with character descriptions and inspirations, cut scenes, song posts, all the blah blah blah.  I hope it's as fun for those of you who choose to read as it's gonna be for me to do!  To get us started, a recap of the events of T...

I'm in the final stages of editing of one project, which I hope to release in the first quarter of next year, and during Nanowrimo, I finished the rough of the sequel to that project, but that draft needs to sit for a little while, like fine wine, so I can go back into it and tear it apart and fix all of the many many things that are wrong with it, so in the meantime, I am working on a completely unrelated project that I've had in draft for a while. This is the first time I've revisited it in a while, and I opened the file with some trepidation, because you never know what you're going to find when you go back to an old project.  It is decent, or is it full of bad writing and problematic concepts and stupidity. But this one is good. Thank God. I mean, it still needs a ton of work, and since it involves three viewpoint characters, that means three times the work, but they are interesting and fun and the plot is still solid.  What a relief . I'm one of tho...

Lately, I've been reading a lot of books where the main character and her best friend don't get along. This is confusing to me. Why is the main character friends with someone she dislikes, or is afraid of, or actually hates? I get that it happens--I've seen Mean Girls . I've read Queen Bees and Wannabes . Heck, I'm old enough to have been the prime audience for Heathers . But in order for this fractured best friend relationship to be convincing, it has to be set up. In both Heathers and Mean Girls , there's a reason why the protagonist is friends with a bunch of b*tches--she chose to be. She knows that they're jerks. In fact, she can feel herself becoming a jerk right along with them. It's part of the character arc, the point of the story, that being friends with these girls is not who she really is. But the relationships I've been seeing lately don't make that kind of sense. The protagonist doesn't have a reason to be friends with...