The first week of writing started off pretty well.  On Wednesday, I spent my time writing some of Lily’s backstory.  Lily is the young woman living on the streets that my main character is trying to help. The trouble she’s in has a long and complicated history that I have already plotted out, but I wanted to write a few of the background pivot points in her voice so that I am fully in her head when I start writing the present story-line.  I’m feeling pretty confident that I understand where she’s coming from.

If you want to keep tabs on what Lily is doing, you can follow my posts about her on my new blog “Birthing the Next Book.”

Thursday I started writing the first scenes from Jo Sullivan’s point of view. After writing about her for three books now I feel I know her personality, so I was able to start right in on the story. She’s not entirely the same woman she was in the first three books, however, since any good continuing character should always grow as the books progress, and in the most recent book, Box of Rain, she had kind of a breakthrough regarding her contentious relationship with her mother so I want to make sure that comes across in the writing this time.

On the new blog, I posted part of a scene where Jo meets Lily’s father for the first time if you want to take a look.

The stumbling block arrived on Friday when I tried to write scenes told in the voice of my third point of view character, Avril. Avril is an existing character, first introduced briefly in Painted Black as the transvestite that Chris goes to when he’s first looking for Lexie. She doesn’t appear in the next two books, but I wanted to show that she is a more important character than those two pages warranted. The fact that Chris, who often spouted homophobic BS, went to Avril for help was intended to convey that his anti-gay rhetoric was mostly for show, and I’m not really sure that came across the way I wanted it to.

The problem is that I don’t know any transgender people personally, and the research I’ve found has only confused me more. Is Avril truly transgender, someone who has always felt like a girl and is working the streets in order to earn money for gender reassignment surgery?  Or is she a transvestite as I first imagined her in the first book, someone who enjoys dressing as a woman and acting like a woman, but has no desire to permanently change her sex? Regardless of which she is, I want to be able to portray her over the top personality without turning her into a caricature.

It is through Avril’s eyes that I want to emphasize the change in Jo’s thinking since her latest conversations with her mother. Avril is good at putting on a front from years of transforming from Bobby Boyle into Avril McCartney. So she finds it easy to see past others’ masks, yet at the same time she cynically suspects everyone is hiding behind one. As her opinion of Jo changes throughout the book, I’m hoping the reader will see the same thing.

Until I resolve my questions about who Avril really is, I’ve decided to move forward with the book concentrating on Jo and Lily for now. Seeing Avril through their eyes may help me resolve my own confusion. Even though I don’t feel I’ve quite got the voice down yet, I posted a short scene about some of Avril’s opinion of Jo in the new blog.

I intend to keep posting excerpts or other meaderings about the book on Birthing the Next Book, so if you want to keep up with what I’m doing without waiting for my weekly updates here, head over to www.thenextstreetstory.wordpress.com and subscribe to receive regular email updates.