Rusty photo © Wrangel
Background photo © David Coleman

I’ll admit it … when reviewing the stories I was planning for Diary of a Misfit I realized I needed a few lighter stories to balance out some of the heavier topics included in the collection and the first thing that popped into my head was an entry about Rusty. *Sigh* Rusty is the sort of character writers fall in love with. He waltzed into the story during Nowhere Feels Like Home, unexpected, larger-than-life, flawed, and irresistible. And not only irresistible to me, but to Sarah and Katie as well. And since these are excerpts out of Katie’s diary, I knew she wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about the most romantic thing she’d ever seen in her life (followed of course by lots of exclamation marks)

Before Rusty had revealed himself to me, I had been getting snippets of what looked like a near rape scene involving Sarah. I knew what I was getting was something out of Sarah’s past, when she was Katie’s age, and it bothered me on a couple levels. The first level was that I had never gotten the sense from Sarah that she had been through that type of experience, and I felt like I should have known before. And the second level was that while I may write a rape scene at some point in my writing career, I really didn’t want it to happen in this series. But as a writer, I follow the path I’ve been shown, so I tucked the scene away and forged ahead, happy not to be at that point in the story, because I knew it’d be a difficult scene to write.

Then Rusty showed up and I knew he was the guy in the scene, but I couldn’t believe it. While he definitely had a dangerous side to him, his feelings about Sarah were pure. Well, as pure as a teenage boy’s can be. As we got closer to where I knew that scene fit, I became more concerned because I really liked Rusty, and it would make the scene even more difficult to write. Until I finally had a clear vision of what actually happened. The way I had seen the scene before was through Matt and Mark’s eyes, and what they saw looked a lot worse than what had happened.

Teaser: A ghost from the past makes an appearance as a marine recruiter, and Sarah and Katie are swept away.

Diary of a Misfit is available now for Kindle. A portion of the proceeds from Diary of a Misfit will go to the Shaka Franklin Foundation for Youth.

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At the beginning, I usually mentally try out some scenarios of simple every day life, to help me get a better understanding of how the characters react and interact with each other and their environment. I want to know them intimately – if I don’t somewhere along the line they will turn into stick figures that I am trying to move through situations rather than full-fledged beings thinking, reacting, and feeling so readers can identify with them. I recently did an interview with Katie McCabe, the main character in my Misfit McCabe series for Carolina Valdez Miller, and have been thinking about having a few more conversations with my characters to get a take on where they might be taking me in the next installment in the series. While this is not another interview, I am amazed that I am still learning things about my characters even though we are going into book 3 together.

I was thinking about Sarah, the cousin Katie is closest to and has the most interaction with, and who is a central character to the series story lines. As thoughts were flitting through my mind, I thought about her getting dressed into the clothes she works around the farm in, and it hit me…I had no idea what brand a jeans she wears. Is she a Levi’s girl or are Wranglers the jean selection of choice? Sarah was a little miffed with me for not knowing, after all, we’ve known each other for quite awhile, and she practically lives in jeans, unless it is a more formal occasion and I hadn’t even noticed what brand she wears?

In my defense, I barely notice what brand I wear let alone anyone else on the planet (or those who inhabit my mind). I am not a fashion maven and never have been. Sarah’s reaction told me that while it is something that had escaped my observation, it is something that is obviously important to her and that she felt the choice says something about her as a character. My initial thought was that she slides into her well worn Levi’s, but the moment the thought was in my mind, she interrupted wanting to know if I had just dressed her in Levi’s. That’s when she got a little irritated with me. I’d like to go on record now as now being aware that Sarah wears Wranglers – no fancy designer jeans, but well worn (and obviously loved) Wrangler jeans. Matt and Mark on the other hand wear Levi’s, which I somehow new because of the little red tag on the back pocket. Draw whatever conclusions you want about that observation.

While it may seem like a small and rather superfluous thing to know whether a character wears Levi’s or Wranglers, it is the sum of all those little details which may or may not make it into the final text which make the characters who they are, and the more you know about them, the more real they will be on the page, and the more your readers will feel like they know them at the end of the book. Which is really the point of the entire exercise.

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