First of all, happy low-70s season to all who celebrate. I am someone who experiences real seasonal depression in the summer—the bright sun and heavy heat make me grumpy and irritable! Top that off with a summer full of chronic migraines and creeping deadlines, and the result is a recipe for disaster. A lot of me, in bed, watching Love Island USA and squinting at my laptop screen, struggling to write a single page.
Thankfully, the temperature has cooled down a bit, giving us a preview of Mother Nature’s best season, and I can feel my creativity/will to live growing stronger by the day. And just in time! I’m currently on deadline for my next novel. I think I’ll be able to tell you more about that soon, but not today.
Today is all about my two little darlings, Immie Meadows and Jack Marshall.
This is a quote from Immie!
Immie and Jack are the main characters in my upcoming novel ALL MY BESTS. The book is dual POV, which means the first half of the book is from Immie’s perspective, and the second half from Jack’s. You’ll get to know them both very well as they navigate their first semester of high school, seeing them through their own eyes and each other’s. Neither is perfect, but that’s why I love them. And I hope, by the end of the novel, you’ll come to know and love them just as much as I do.
Check out this edit by Sab (sabs_writing) that perfectly captures their vibe.
Before AMB, I’d never written dual POV. My chapter book series, WITCHES OF PECULIAR, is third person limited, following two twin witches, but it doesn’t get in their heads the way this book does. It was a challenge, first finding Immie and Jack’s unique voices, and then being able to bounce back and forth between them. I was especially worried about making sure Jack’s section felt true to the thoughts and observations of a teenage boy, something that I personally have never been. To get this right, I consumed a lot of teen media. I studied the dialect of my male friends (still teenage boys at heart). I asked my partner, about a hundred times, if certain things sounded right, or what a teenage boy might say in response to a given situation (he ended up playing a large role in the formation of Jack’s sense of humor).
Hardest of all: the soccer. Jack eats, sleeps, and breathes soccer. When I started writing this book, I knew nothing about soccer besides ball in net = score and Harry Kane. I had to do a lot of basic research about the rules of the game, obviously, but I also had to put myself in the mindset of an athlete. For instance: losing games means nothing to me (I am the least competitive person on the planet), but for Jack, losing is a direct reflection of his skills and self-worth. He genuinely thinks he will not be loved if he doesn’t win. What would it feel like to walk around every day with such a weight on your shoulders?
Every sentence I wrote in Jack’s POV was a conscious effort to put myself into his body. It almost never felt natural, like I could lose myself in it, which admittedly worried me during drafting. So imagine my surprise when my editor read the first draft and said that Jack’s section was stronger than Immie’s. As it turned out, it was that painstaking conscious effort—the careful planning and articulation of his thoughts, mannerisms, and words—that allowed for the creation of something unconscious and natural. Jack: a character who, despite sharing some core beliefs and neurosis, is entirely separate from me.
Creating Immie was the opposite. I had an inherent understanding of her from the beginning—or at least, I thought I did. The first thing I wrote was her letter, which ended up being completely scrapped and rewritten, like most of her arc, because it turned out I didn’t know her as well as I thought. It took several drafts of her section—double the amount of Jack’s—for me to really figure her out.
Avoiding spoilers, Immie’s journey throughout the novel is similar to something I was going through while I was writing it. Like most forms of grief, it’s the kind of thing you can really only understand once it happens to you. The experience helped me appreciate Immie’s emotions in a new way, and ended up shaping how she expresses herself. She puts up a wall because isolation is safer than rejection. She embraces the strangest parts of herself so other people can’t use them against her. She is weird—she collects taxidermy butterflies and her bedspread is decapitated Marie Antoinette heads—and it shows in her voice. It has to.
Immie and Jack love each other for who they are, but also for what the other provides. To Jack, Immie is the calm eye in the raging storm. She is his escape from the chaos of his home life or the stress of the soccer field. To Immie, Jack is pure devotion and companionship. He knows her quirks better than anyone and likes her because of them. They are each other’s safe space. The scenes with just Jack and Immie together, feeling happy and at peace, were some of my favorites to write. They have such chemistry, these two! My editor actually ended up cutting a few scenes between the two of them because, as she puts it, “your characters love to talk to each other.”
There’s so much more I could say, but I worry it would cross into spoiler territory, so I’ll refrain (for now). Mainly I hope this gives you some insight into who these characters are, and maybe, will make you want to learn more about them by preordering the book :)
I said in my last post that I’d always share sales, so here’s another: If you’d like to preorder AMB, Barnes & Noble’s 25 percent off preorders sale is running now through Friday at midnight. You can get the AMB paperback for $6, or the hardcover for $14. Just use the code PREORDER25. This is probably the last time you’ll be able to take advantage of this deal before AMB comes out on November 12.
And now, I leave you with this:
I made Immie and Jack into Sims :)