Now that Awakening is being queried and I’m in the thick of waiting for the perfect agent to come along, fall in love with my manuscript, and send me an offer, I’ve turned my attention back on Book II. I had paused on the first draft close to the 25% mark, and when I went to continue writing this morning, I was thrilled to find out I had come to a character’s first chapter.

The Stone Key Chronicles (TSKC) series will all be written in third-person limited narration, which is a fancy way to say each chapter will be written from the perspective of a specific character. While each book will rotate through several characters, there will be a slight fluctuation on which characters I choose to spotlight for each book. This means that the protagonist and main characters will always take center stage but a few new voices will come and go.

The “new” character’s chapter I’ve started on happens to be one readers will recognize from Awakening, though this particular character never had their own chapter in that book. Nevertheless, the character was a favorite with beta readers, and so they will be getting their own chapters in Book II. I am incredibly excited to bring this character to “life” through the written word!

Maybe it’s just me and my overactive imagination, but when I sit down to write from the prospective of one of my characters, I have to visualize every aspect of them beforehand. What are their beliefs? What drives them? What is their environment like? What kind of mannerisms do they have? What event(s) has carved them into the character they are at the point where the reader is introduced to them? So many factors go into constructing a character, but when I add them all up, I get this perfect internal vision of them like some kind of MMORPG character on the creation screen looking around and waiting for the game to begin. When that moment happens, everything else suddenly falls into place. Somehow, all those little details perfectly come together to bring their voice to life in my mind.

It is no small thing to go through that creation process, but is an incredibly rewarding one once it’s complete!