Six Sentence Sunday: Chatterboxes opening

Confession – I forgot about Six Sentence Sunday last week until it was too late to make the official list, and instead of putting up an unofficial entry again, I just ignored it and put up a Campaigner Spotlight. But this week, I’m organized and ready!

This is near the beginning of my most recent draft of my speculative novel “Chatterboxes”:

What I remember most was the red laser light flashing in my eye. It was that kind of a club – somewhere in downtown Hamilton, doesn’t really matter where. Aside from lasers, there was the smoke machine, (so that the lasers could light up the smoke and stand out in high relief, never mind that everything else was fuzzed out,) and that kind of loud dance music that everybody loves to complain about because you can’t talk to anybody without yelling in their ears.

I don’t always complain. If you want to be able to talk to strangers in a comfortable atmosphere, with soft music and lights on the moderately dim side, (not to mention clean air,) then go and try to pick somebody up at a damn coffeehouse. On a good night, all of the music and the other distractions are something that I can just sail through, and maybe even borrow energy from, start to feel confident with the basic paradoxes of the singles scene.

I’m not sure if I love this passage, but it’s fun. It also definitely reminds me of writing on the first day of National Novel Writing Month!

Lisa Winfield

L is for…

Lisa Winfield is probably the breakout main character of my 2008 Nano book, ‘Chatterboxes.’ (I also wrote over 50,000 words of one of my Firefly Kaylee fanfics during November 2008, but that’s another story, literally.) Chatterboxes was originally conceived of as an ensemble book, but Lisa was the one who I spent the most time on prep with, so she’s the most vividly characterized, and the book begins and ends with her point of view.

I drew a lot from myself and my family to flesh Lisa out. She lives in Stoney Creek, not that far from my own apartment on the East side of Hamilton, where she and her best friend Kay share half of a duplex. She works at a Pizza Pizza franchise, spends a lot of time in trivia chat rooms online, and wonders if she’ll ever get back together with her ex-fiancee, who cheated on her but who she still loves. Like me she’s an extreme introvert who tries tof force herself out of her shell in certain situations and is often dissatisfied with the success of her attempts. I also borrowed somewhat on the character of Meredith Grey, from ‘Grey’s anatomy’, particularly in connection to some of Lisa’s verbal tics and her sarcastic attitude.

I’m not quite sure what else to say about Lisa in a blog post, except possibly to share one of my favorite moments with her, which comes from a fairly intense scene near the end of the book, where she and her new friend Kelson have been captured by a villainness who is trying to find out their secret.