So…I’ve been grinding out word after word of Akira and Zane’s honeymoon and mostly hating it. It’s not that the words aren’t good, they’re fine. But I hate it anyway.

Today, I couldn’t do it. Could NOT do it. So I decided to just let my fingers fly, write anything, whatever the words were that the fingers typed, that was fine, even if they were the same words over and over again. Write, write, write, damn you.

And I discovered — I am entirely resistant to writing about Akira and Zane because it means being mean to them. I have a plot. A good plot. It involves them being UNHAPPY. I don’t want them to be unhappy. I don’t want that to happen. And my fingers–they don’t want to write that.

When I let them go, they started writing an entirely new story instead. A girl named Fen. Busy fighting off a murderer, not very effectively. A much, much darker story than I anticipated, a girl who’s far more bitter than I knew and a sense of OMG, FUN! that was totally unexpected. There’s a character–meant to die in this scene, meant to convey through his death that this is a darker book–well, he declined to die. And he’s horrible. Truly horrible. And also Spike, from Buffy. Yeah, he’s a psychopath. Yeah, he mildly regrets having to kill you. But we all gotta do what we all gotta do and the heroine’s death, it’s just what he’s gotta do.

He lived. And I wrote happily.

Fen is by far my darkest character. I don’t know how far I’ll get with her. She understands depression and death and suicidal ideation and cutting and being alone in a way that I’ve never even tried to reach with my other characters. And I believe–oh, I so believe–that there is sunshine in her future. I want to write her and that feels really, really good.

Might take me a while to finish Akira’s carefully-plotted horror story. But that’s okay. Telling my fingers to do what they would gave me more joy today than any writing I’ve done in weeks, so that’s the new plan. I’ll be mean to Akira someday. But meanwhile, Fen? She doesn’t even understand mean. She thinks that’s what life is all about. I love her.