Does it make me a bad person for being tempted to put up a wikipedia entry for a character no one knows about...yet? Although it'd be neat to see how long it stayed up, I guess I won't.

Devin Gallows-O'Keefe, not in fact, the name of anyone I'm interested, but rather the protagonist of the novel I'm writing. Although I've written a few novel-length stories already, this is the first one that I'm at all hopeful will be marketable.

I've got a little under 9 months to finish it before I crush the dreams of my inner-child forever. While my inner sixteen-year-old deals with crushes, my inner ten-year-old reminds me that I'm supposed to finish this book before I'm 30. She's pretty pushy for a little kid! Technically I wrote my first novel by the time I was 23, but I'm pretty sure the inner child meant one that had a snowball's chance in hell of being published, so I toil on.

Anyway, I feel like writing about Devin today. If you don't feel like reading about her, skip this entry. FYI, this novel is aimed at teens (and up since adults read YA fiction too). I've always held an affinity for children's lit, and it seems like a good place to start.

Devin was your typical thirteen-year-old kid growing up under the shadow of a dead golden boy, and under the roof of strict, religious, parents. It's not an exciting life, but she was fairly content.

Until she: a. started having nightmares about people believing that she's the one who is going to bring about "the dark" b. two strange people tried to kidnap her c. she learned her whole life was a lie when her parents dump her at her real father's house.

Devin, unlike a lot of other protagonists in children's lit, is a truly normal kid. Besides her strange dreams, she's not in anyway powerful or magical. People are only after her because she's a pawn in a game between her father and "the bad guys." She isn't even perfect for a normal kid. She's not a straight-A student, she occasionally screws up when dealing with her new siblings, and she's not a child-genius. What fun is it to write about someone who's perfect? I want to write about someone who feels real.

This story either falls under the label of urban fantasy or contemporary horror. Personally I lean towards the former since the supernatural beings in the story (offspring of Lilith and the fallen angels) aren't exactly evil monsters and don't go around racking up a body count. Urban Fantasy is a genre I like anyway, and would love to someday be as good at writing it as Emma Bull or Holly Black. Something about setting a fantasy story in the now, in reality as we know it, is vastly appealing to me. I thought it'd be fun to try my hand at it without using the standard fairies approach, too. There's more to fantasy than fairies, witches, and elves, right? Why Lilith? I didn't learn anything about the myth until I was 18, and I bet this is true of a lot of Christian children, who are the majority in this country, so it makes the plot just a bit exotic, which hopefully makes it interesting too.

As of Thursday, when my muse returned suddenly after skipping town while I was working six days a week, I've edited the first 47 pages of the story to my satisfaction. That leaves 80 pages to go... and the last third or so of the book to write as well. But, given that I wrote the first 50,000 words in a month, I think I can handle another 10-25,000 in nine.

I hope.