I was having a sort of weirdly selected writer's block. I couldn't bring myself to be interested in characters other than the ones I am already using (despite the fact that the current book is far from finished and I've still got a bunch of characters I'll be happy to add to it.)
Dropped a couple bucks on an artist I've worked with before (at Fiverrrr), seeing if my new idea for covers was going to work. I think I've successfully determined it won't, so that was money well spent. But even though it won't work for the book I have, one of his paintings made me want to write the book it would work for.
So I'm over that block and can consider other work again.
In the other recent bit of bouncing ideas, I'm slowed down considerably by not being comfortable with two of the characters I have in the current book. And that's bad, because there really aren't a lot of main characters.
Amelia is Penny's main confidante and foil in this one. Which is a pattern I need to start breaking soon, what with Aki in the last book, and (although only barely) Drea in the first. Hell, I went with First Person, even knowing the problems that POV has, because I figured Penny would be on her own for big chunks of the story and that was one way to avoid dead air.
Then there are the "bohemians" (Penny thinks about them in that way but has never explicitly named them). The angry young artist Bastien has most of the screen time, with Célestine only in a couple of scenes and Girard in perhaps a few more. Girard is the other member of an intentionally La Boheme love triangle with Amelia and Bastien. Célestine is the lead singer of a stage act that most of that small circle of artists are involved in.
And Nathan Snow and his gang. The parkour nut Jaques has been met and named and Penny will continue to have a little friendly contest with him, but the rest of the gang will barely get names.
Of course you could probably count Huxley, since it is his memoir Penny is following around Paris. He is at least somewhat developed as a character and has a small character arc.
So. The two things I need to do to try to get a better approach to Amelia is to finally get around to watching Amelié (it was going to be Amelia's favorite movie. It might turn out not to work.) And listen to a bunch of talk in a North Carolina accent. It really has been too long since I was in the tarheel state.
For Bastien? My bright idea right now is for him to be more street. Using Franglish slang, quite consciously -- it is a bit of an act. And boy is that some weird roads. I don't even know where to look to find good examples of Parisians speaking street English. Most of that is more about sharing a mixed collection of languages with other people in the same street culture.
It is said that there are more speakers of English as a second language among non-native French speakers than there are those who grew up speaking predominantly English. So it is the lingua franca, the pidgin, the patois -- as one person put it in a forum recently, more people speak broken English than any other language on Earth.
So it doesn't really work to include the typical youth culture language tricks within an address to outsider native-English speakers. For instance; verlan. That's entirely French, but is the intentional reversal of some words for the effect. It also isn't just any word, but words that are common verlangs.
Another bit is including English in a conversation in French. And as part of this, French grammar is attached to the English. So "to talk" might be rendered as the hybrid verb "talker." A little easier to work into an English sentence than verlang, at least.
And then there is Paris and street slang; words and phrases that aren't common in polite French. But this is a bit of the Funny Foreigner problem once again. The random substitution of what are usually commonly-understood words just to remind the reader that the speaker is French. You understand, oui?
But it is an idea. And I got it because while I was stuck feeling unable to write any more about two characters that weren't working....I watched a bunch of The Expanse.
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