IWSG - October

It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group! 

The awesome co-hosts for the October 1 posting of the IWSG are Beth Camp, Crystal Collier, and Cathrina Constantine!

This month's question is a good one!

 

What is the most favorite thing you have written, published or not? And why?

My favorite thing I've written is the book I'm currently querying,  A Stranger to Kindness.  It's the hardest book I've ever written and took me over five years to complete because I had a complete crisis of confidence after writing about 15K and I ended up abandoning it for quite some time, wrote another book, then came back to it and found my way into the story and the characters in a way I hadn't been able to before.

I'm not usually someone who worries too much about plot in my books.  They tend to be more character driven and the plot kind of develops as I explore the characters and how they act and react to the people and situations around them.  In A Stranger to Kindness, the main character is very damaged and stuff most people can do without much thought is incredibly challenging for him.  And these challenges really drove the plot for me in this book, to the point where things happen to him that I wasn't expecting, but were, in retrospect, exactly what would happen to this kid.

I kind of love him.

But I don't just love Harley, the main character.  I also love his brother, Wolfe and the friend he makes at his new school, Meg.  Meg's not an entirely new character - she's the younger sister of the main character in Stumped - but she's a few years older now, and the sass she demonstrated as an eleven-year-old in that book, has developed into some real bad-assery in this one.

I love this book because I love the characters, but I also feel like it's a hugely satisfying story on many levels.  It's about trauma and family and love and finding a place to call home.  I think I managed to write a really satisfying arc for my characters and, like in the best stories, they're different at the end than they were at the start. 

I also think I did a pretty good job with the voice in this one.  Voice is something that comes pretty naturally to me, but finding a voice for a POV character who doesn't speak was a huge challenge for me.  My writing background is in theatre and film, so dialogue plays a massive part in my storytelling.  I think the crisis of confidence I faced in writing this book was based largely on the fact I couldn't lean on dialogue to do any heavy lifting here because Harley's mute for most of the book.

Unfortunately, you can't read this book yet because it's not published.  And if the number of rejections it's racking up is anything to go by, it may not be any time soon.  But if you're interested in my favorite of my published books, it's Stumped - the one in which Meg plays a small part.  

What's your favorite thing you've written?  Is it published?  I'd love to add it to my TBR pile if it is!