This fourth Street Stories novel is a risk. They say write what you know. I know nothing about what it is like to be LGBTQ, but I do know that up to 40% of homeless youth are living on the streets because of their gender preference. Because they have been thrown out and sometimes abused by those who should take care of them. In addition, homeless LGBTQ persons are at greater risk on the streets from a society that rejects them. If you don’t believe me, read what the National Coalition for the Homeless has to say on the subject.

So it is important for me to convey that reality in this next book. To do that, I need feedback from those who know more about the issues than I do. I humbly hope to receive honest feedback as I struggle to make Avril a very real and believable character. Will you help me? I am going to post links to two different scenes where Avril is present, but seen through the eyes of others.

We first meet Avril briefly at the end of Chapter 1, from Lily’s point of view, but we don’t really get much there except that she is a man dressed as a woman. Lily is too distracted by labor pains to pay much attention. I hint that Lily is afraid of Avril for some reason we don’t know. Yet she is still willing to ask her for help. Click the quote below to read the partial chapter.

Avril wouldn’t want to help her if she knew. Would hate her. But to save her baby, Lily would have to pretend. To lie. She was good at that, wasn’t she?

It isn’t until Chapter two, told from Jo Sullivan’s point of view, that we spend enough time with Avril to get a fuller picture. Jo feels awkward around Avril, as many people would, so that comes through, but is Avril’s dialogue coming across as real despite Jo’s discomfort? Click the quote below to read the whole chapter, then let me know what you think.

When Jo first met a street artist nicknamed CRY, the brutal murder of a friend and his fear of being forced to turn tricks to survive on the streets had made the boy somewhat homophobic and yet it had been this Avril who he’d gone to when looking for a missing girl and it was Avril who he’d continued to correspond with by letter after he got into Job Corps.

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.