FINDING YOUR HEROINE'S VOICE

Well, I'm currently a little shy of 13,000 words on THE MOONBEAM RIDER novel. I'm about fifty pages in and starting on chapter three. The complete book should come in at around 70,000 words. That's about 260 pages. 

Once you have a strong grasp of the story you are writing, the beginning of any undertaking to write a novel is mostly about finding your hero's - or in this case heroine's - voice. 

I'm writing about NOA ASH, a sixteen year old adolescent female, a very complex personality to scribe about. I am also writing my first novel in the first person. So I am literally writing in my heroine Noa's own words. 

It's a good thing that I've spent a lot of time around teenagers (I'm a former gymnast who still spends a lot of time in the gym working out and working with young gymnasts). When people become adults, they often forget how young people think and perceive the world. 

But, like writing any character, it takes a certain amount of fumbling around before you dial in on who that character is and what they will and won't do. I've now gotten to the point where I feel I truly know Noa Ash.

I'm also trying to be careful to make Noa a genuine girl. I've flipped through some Young Adult novels written with female leads and often I can tell when a male author has penned the book.

For a genre novel (science fiction/action adventure), Noa is a very unique creation from many of the characters in other genre fiction novels. She is biracial (the product of a Black father and white mother). Noa also starts out overweight. After the death of her parents, she is sent to live with a grandmother she has never met on remote and scary SHADOW BEACH,  where Noa begins to surf the dark waters. By the end of the second chapter, she sees her reflection cast in the water and realizes she has not only lost weight, but become fit.  

I still have a long way to go. But I promise to start moving forward on the book cover art, so that I can have something visually dazzling for all of you. 

Plus, once the first three chapters are tightly polished, I will have a voice actress do a audio recording of them, so you can hear Noa Ash in her own words.

Aloha.

Carlton Holder