Blog Archives

Another teen character, part 3. I can't seem to avoid them.

4/17/2015

Anyhow, I digressed slightly in the previous blog. (Notice how I am continuing as if there wasn't a day and a half between posts?) What has the origins of Collection got to do with my thought not another kid?

Well, I started considering my next work, and damn if it doesn’t look like another kid will be a main character.

If I can “blame” anybody, and I really can’t, it would be my doctoral students in my Psychotherapy Interventions class.

This spring 2015 semester has been an examination of different interventions from around 10 different theoretical orientations. I set up the class so that textbooks reflecting these ten orientations were potential reads. The students had to choose two as their readings for the class (in addition to two other texts that everyone read).

There are multiple assignments in a variety of formats (believe me, they are complex – and I have to grade them all). One assignment involves selecting a subgroup of 5-6 students to serve as an expert panel to describe how they would work with a particular client. There is no preparation for the client, the panel will be informed about the client and then they had to start providing a case conceptualization and a treatment plan based on the theory in one of their selected texts.

Now, here is where the kid idea came in…

Their clients were to be YouTube bloggers. Many people suffering from mental illness will make multiple presentations about their symptoms and related personal issues. Most of the YouTube bloggers are young in their twenties. I spent a lot of time searching for clients who would be diverse. With much effort, I found some ethnic diversity, but not much age diversity. I only recently found a male who was in his fifties, but too late to be used in the class. The only age “diversity” I could find was downward – and I found a handful of teenagers who were articulate enough to serve the needs of the class. One was a young guy, somewhere in the 12-14 range who was exceptionally eloquent for his age and who professed to have a rather unique disorder.

This particular kid mentioned that he has Depersonalization Disorder – a condition where the individual has a persistent sense that he is observing himself or herself from outside his/her body. These feelings of unreality are quite disturbing, and the person wonders whether they are even alive.

As this kid described his experiences in a graphic manner, I began to think there’s a novel in this. Nearly simultaneously, someone in the class yelled out, “Hey Dr. Hains, this sounds like a plot from one of your books.”

The student was right of course (after all, I was thinking that very thing at the same time). So, I started plotting and organizing. Nothing is written yet other than a short outline. But, if I pull this off, I think the narrative will be exciting.

Only thing, though, is that it will involve another kid.

Not another teen character, part 2

4/16/2015

Cover of The Other by Thomas Tryon - one of the best haunted teen novels ever...

When I finish a piece, I usually put it away for at three months before I look at it again. So, with a solid draft of Sweet Aswang tucked away out of sight, I began Dead Works. As I indicated in a previous blog, Dead Works was not supposed to be about kids. I wanted to think like an adult for long periods of time, and I had a working mental outline for Dead Works. The story revolved around a psychologist and ghost hunting. I just couldn’t get it moving, however. The big reason, I think, is that I had become consumed by a minor subplot involving one of the psychologist’s cases – a boy who is in therapy because he thinks he sees ghosts. Push came to shove and I jettisoned the original plot and focused on this aspect of the narrative. I realized up front that at first glance this sounded like the movie The Sixth Sense. My plot, though, was considerably different, so I wasn’t worried about pursuing something that would sound really familiar to potential readers.

Once again, my professional life contributed source material. The psychologist character became a graduate student in counseling psychology who was working on his PhD. The young therapist is doing his practicum placement at the university counseling center and he is assigned a teenage client who is seeing ‘things’. Since I teach practicum classes at both the Master’s level and the PhD level, I have a pretty good idea what the process feels like for trainees. I decided early in the process that the entire context for the novel would take place within the counseling relationship between the teen and the student. I found I couldn’t hold myself to this given the complexity of the plot, but I managed to keep all points of view outside of the therapy to the graduate student.

As life tends to be unpredictable, my third effort, Dead Works, was published after Birth Offering. I was still messing with Sweet Aswang, and was pleased when Damnation Books accepted Dead Works. Anyway, with Sweet Aswang still in the wings, my first three books were shaping up to have teenage protagonists.

So, I was sick of kids.

Then I started work on my next piece, tentatively titled Collection. This took nearly two years to finish, but I am pleased to announce that the first complete draft was saved to multiple files last week. This will remain untouched for three or four months before I go back to begin the revision process. I am excited to say that the point of view is entirely from a 60-year old female sheriff. Quite a departure from the usual stuff, but a refreshing challenge. I had to put myself into a mindset of the character, and I started by engaging her inner dialog without swearing. Now, I realize that 60-year old women these days do not restrict themselves to the king’s English (I know plenty of women around that age and many curse like sailors), but I felt that Lacey would not do this. So, that was my initial effort for that point of view. Teenagers have more range when it comes to naughty words, but a more limited vocabulary. However, my 60 year old sheriff was ended up being a refined thinker. We’ll see how she holds up after my three or four month hiatus from the manuscript.

Not another teen character...

4/13/2015

My only (thus far) hesitant thought about the plot of my next fiction effort was, “Not another kid POV”.

The POV stands for “point of view”. And yes, as a potential plotline for my next novel was developing, it kept leaning towards another child character. Not just any child either, another young teenager.

Shoot.

But honestly, I kept going back to this scenario, no matter how hard I tried to shift the focus. The narrative just wouldn’t work without such a character.

Maybe I should explain.

I have written before about the roots of horror in my life. I have traced it back to a number of potential sources, the two most important being catching a TV trailer/commercial for the Village of the Damned in 1960 and becoming infatuated with dinosaurs around the same time. While the fascination with monster movies grew from these origins, my interest in horror fiction received a real jolt with the reading of The Other and The Exorcist in the early 1970s. One commonality about these two novels was having a youth protagonist at the center of the story (something also shared with the Village of the Damned from 1960). I realized early on that having an evil child or a defenseless child at the mercy of something monstrous intensified exponentially the sense of fear and danger. These were cheap thrills, granted, but chilling nonetheless. I knew that if I ever wrote a horror novel, I would follow with a similar theme. Go for the jugular, and do it with a teen character.

Birth Offering was written with this goal. I knew the type of character Ryan would be…a typical fourteen year old with some added strengths to allow him to survive a series of harrowing events. This boy had to confront ghostly apparitions and literally wrestle with demonic creatures and an evil adult bent on his destruction. I am pleased with the way Ryan turned out.

During the two-plus years I was peddling Birth Offering, I wrote two other pieces. The first of the two, Sweet Aswang, had close connections to my professional endeavors. I’m a university professor in the area of counseling psychology, and my research focus is in pediatric psychology. That is, my interests are related to issues of chronic illness in kids. Specifically, my research agenda involves the problems that teenagers have with adhering to their medical regimens. In my research the focus has primarily been with kids who have Type 1 diabetes. What originally started as a short story, Sweet Aswang evolved into a forty-four thousand word novella. In the story, two teenagers who have Type 1 diabetes find themselves coming face to face with an unusual monster (the title gives it away). As far as I can tell, this is the first diabetes-related monster/horror story.

This blog will continue...

Another teen character, part 3. I can't seem to avoid them.

Not another teen character, part 2

Not another teen character...

Author

Archives

Categories