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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Tim photo © Alptraum
Creek photo © David Coleman

Tim’s Shiner is the first story in Diary of a Misfit and was one of the reasons Diary of a Misfit was written. As a writer, I had to get the story out. And it proved to me something I had not thought possible before … I could actually write a short story with the right circumstances in place.

I am a novelist by nature. My ideas don’t come in short work form, but are always more geared to longer works. I have attempted short stories in the past, but nothing satisfied me because I wanted to write the full story and stopping short felt incomplete, and so the story died a swift death while an inner battle raged.

Tim’s Shiner was different. I had already written the full story … well, I’m still writing the story, but working on book four in the series … and I didn’t feel the same need to complete the story because I looked at the short as a scene and not a complete work. I also already knew the characters well, and that might be a part of why other short stories are hard for me to write. The characters develop as I write, and I get to know them along the way. A short story doesn’t have enough words for me to become properly acquainted with the characters.

And Tim’s Shiner was something I had wanted to write for a while. A chance to give a bit more of Katie’s best friend’s background, and to show their relationship in a younger time. Before everything changed.

The teaser: When her best friend Tim shows up on her doorstep with a black eye, Katie McCabe teases him for being a klutz, until she learns the horrifying truth.

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.

The post Diary of a Misfit – Tim’s Shiner appeared first on Be the Cat.