Y So Hot?

Yay for lame titles!

Anyway one thing I've noticed lately is a lot of people seem to be writing YA. Like, a lot of people. Nothing really wrong with this, but I can't help but wonder, why?

And since I feel that's not really long enough for a post, more random musings:



My characters have really filthy mouths. Again, nothing really particularly wrong with this, but they do. Particularly Beckett. I think Beckett says fuck more times in one chapter than he uses "the", which is the most commonly used word in the English language, understandably. In fact he probably says fuck more times than he says any other word, ever. He's like one big fuck machine. (No, not like that) Daniel doesn't swear nearly as much, but that's because Daniel likes playing the tepid newbie. He is a bit of a cautious newbie, given that Chapter 3 is the start of his first day and Chapter 6 is the start of his second day, but he's not nearly as bad as he initial leads one to believe.

Instead of swearing, Daniel is just an unlikeable bastard. He likes putting on acts to get things from people, something which makes him a pretty good cop, but is kind of assholish. Especially because some (maybe most) of it, like playing the idiot greenhorn, is done pretty much just to mess with his superiors. Daniel also breaks into the grocery store he used to work in at the end of chapter one to steal some milk and bread. Okay, to be fair he isn't actually stealing. He takes the stuff when he doesn't have any money and breaks in later to leave the money for what he took plus a little extra as compensation. Also to be fair, the owner is an idiot. His security system is so simplistic the wind could break it. Actually I think the segment where Daniel breaks into the store is the best written part of my WIP so far, which is kind of sad when you think about it. Might be tied with the beginning of chapter six.

That's another thing. I do really epic descriptions of things like Daniel's breaking into the store, or Daniel's apartment, or the police headquarters, and then I just kind of lazily describe things like the Browns' house as a pale blue terraced house. I feel like I should balance them out, but I can't bring myself to ruin the beautiful descriptions and I feel like if I ramp up the descriptions of other things the story will delve into purple prose. Maybe I'm just overthinking things here and everything's fine. We are our harshest critics after all.

Lastly, I've been considering two things. Number One: Drawing up a quick, crude map just showing the various neighborhoods of the city, no real street names or parks or landmarks or anything. Don't worry I will "borrow" the good camera when it comes to that. Number Two: Temporarily posting up the second chapter for your pleasure, because it's fairly short and doesn't really spoil anything and I think it's stronger than my first chapter. Bear in mind this would be a totally unedited first draft copy. I'm not even going to eye it over for typos. I'd just Ctrl+V it into a blog post. Thoughts?