Dinah.

In the spirit of not sitting around doing nothing until November and NaNoWriMo, I am editing Alien Blue again, this time using the techniques I picked up during the for-hire YA. Already, I’m figuring out why things weren’t working and what I could do to fix them.

Still hard to make myself sit still and do it, but not as gut-wrenching as it was last time. For now? Anyway, I’m plugging along, digging through stuff, cutting it down to size, when I run into Dinah. I had to smile. I’m going to say it’s a good sign. I hate to edit, but I’m putting up with it because I get to spend more time with the characters. And I like the main character, but he talks too much.

Her eyes are big, her nose is straight, and her chin is tiny and sharp. She’s got this big forehead, but not so big that it looks like it was going to make her head tip over, if you see what I mean. She has little tits, and it looks like her butt had been pulled off a different model and stuck onto her waist by some shortsighted dollmaker. Which is to say she has a cheerfully big butt. She’d stuffed it into a pair of ugly khaki pants with the cuffs wrapped up tight and tucked into her hiking boots. She had a white t-shirt that still smelled like raw girl left out in the sunshine a little too long.

But what I love about her, the thing that struck me on first sight, was her mouth. Not her lips, her mouth. All the time she was walking up to me in the bar, she was talking to herself. There was this ongoing conversation going on, and nobody was going to know about it but her and the little voices in her head, I guess. And while she talked to herself, her hands twitched at her sides, as if she were subvocalizing hand gestures to keep pace with her one-sided conversation. And that wasn’t all. She would talk out of one side of her mouth, mumble mumble mumble, and it was the other side of her mouth that answered here, mimble mimble mimble.

Maybe it wouldn’t have struck most people, but it exactly fit my requirements for an ideal spouse–good ass, a little nutty, and a good conversationalist (not to mention able to entertain herself if necessary).