The beats are better. Clearer, at least. Tom Bell is still turning ally too quickly, and Julian Bleekman isn't getting enough love, even when I gave him a whole scene to use. Also, pushing Dylan out just caused Luke to take over his slot as good-looking, sympathetic friend. At this point it would take far too little to tip it over into a full YA Love Triangle. And Miguel and Jesus can't for the life of them get any screen time.
But then, I only had 8K to work with. So I'm not entirely unhappy with all that.
No, the problem is, I've realized I don't like Penny.
I don't mean as a person. I don't entirely mean the difficulty of writing her. I mean that she may not be a good character to hang a book on. Or a good character at all, but that's part of the problem; I can't say if she is believable or nuanced because she seems so very unfocused to me.
She wasn't, after all, designed.
Penny is the result of multiple unplanned, on-the-fly decisions made to allow the plot of the first book to work. And others that were meant to aim her at where I had originally intended to go; to evolve quickly into a fairly typical confident, wise-cracking hero.
Instead I got a motormouth neurotic, bouncing between overconfidence and ruthlessly tearing herself down; both born of an extreme lack of confidence. And yet I keep writing her into situations where she needs to be brave one moment and paralyzed the next, physically competent but without the applicable training, deeply informed on nuances of history and culture yet with huge and surprising gaps in her understanding of even the basics.
I set out, in the current book, to roll back a few things I didn't like. A big one was getting rid of all the lectures and a necessary corollary was to make her less educated in the subjects at hand (because when you've got a motor-mouthed First Person protagonist, if they know anything about a subject, they are bound to blurt it out.)
I wanted to put her back in danger and make it relatable, which meant downplaying her history of (unlikely) successes and her hard-won skills.
But I don't like what I'm getting. She's sounding, well, childish. She's so out of her depth she feels like the damsel character the real hero will be rescuing when he shows up.
And as usual when Penny plays things close to the chest, it is hard showing the reader what is actually going behind that plucky cheerful more-than-a-little-ditzy mask.
And yet this is still closer to where I want to be. The Tomb Raider-archetype 200-casualty firefight in the streets of Cairo got dumped pretty much as soon as I tried to actually write anything like that. Like it or not, I need that world where a ten-minute training montage doesn't give you the ability to beat up ninja warriors, where snarky dialogue filled with pop-culture references doesn't impress the bad guys, where the minions have names and few problems can be solved by punching them in the face.
And yet, and yet, a book where these pleasures are still represented, even in mutated form. Where there still are those beats of adventure and heroism and wish-fulfillment.
So I don't really know where I need Penny to be, much less how I would go about getting her there now that there are so many books already down. On the latter, however, I will say I am flirting more than a little with the idea of making a three or four book "America" cycle, part Jessica Fletcher, part Bill Bixby, as Penny wanders the blue highways being an amateur sleuth in various strange parts of rural Americana.
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