I got my thesis in the mail the other day.

In it is basically a few years’ worth of work crammed into a streamlined version I wrote over the course of six months. I was basically writing a new book – anyway, writing is hard. I know that. I need to preface these posts with that sentiment, an acknowledgement that I understand. Writing a novel is hard.

I had to cut a character out of this final draft. I think, deep down, I knew she wasn’t going to make it, but I still had her in enough scenes that they were a big part of the major restructuring. Unlike plot elements – of which many did not and likely will not make the final final final draft – something about eliminating characters from the narrative feels harder and more personal. It’s really hard for me to cut characters sometimes, but like—

Listen—

If you don’t cut extraneous characters, your shit will look like Moonstone.

Moonstone stands at a healthy 220 pages long. A little short, even, for YA fantasy. So why

on earth

are there 16 named characters in this entire novel. Why are we focusing on eight of them in a 220-page book?

Here’s a screencap of my phone notes, including all the names I forgot:

The worst one here is “witch lady,” because I had just written the first post and refreshed myself on her name, Kizzy. The second worst is that Corey’s name is actually spelled Cory. Third is that Hot Cousin’s name is Matt. These were what I remembered from the novel, there may be more. Some of them aren’t necessarily important, like the teacher or a bus driver I didn’t include. I’m gonna defend my brain-vomit by saying I wrote this list at work and didn’t have the book with me, but so consumed was I with disdain for this thing that I persisted.

So, Allie is obviously first, as the main character, but we will get to her. She’s getting her own post, because our main character is a fucking disaster and not in the fun way. We’ll start with Faye.

Or Fay.

Yeah, we’re getting to it right now:

HOW DO YOU NOT SPELL YOUR CHARACTER’S NAME CONSISTENTLY? IT’S FOUR LETTERS! IT ISN’T HARD! THIS WAS 2008! YOU HAD FIND AND REPLACE!

WHY?

I’ve let this book toss me into throes of great distress in the past few months, and I’ve excused a lot of it. It’s cheesy, it’s disjointed, and it’s poorly plotted but—that’s mechanical stuff that needs to be learned, that’s the result of poor planning and execution. Misspelling one of your main characters’ name two different ways and doing it consistently over 220 pages is laziness. It’s carelessness. When you published this novel, you did so with the intent of asking people to pay money for it. How do you possibly take pride in your work if you’re okay with this? I just—I can’t. I need to move on. Faye is a nothing character who is a shitty mom and she gets kidnapped by the end and needs to be saved by Allie because her hands a superglued to a table—

—And I still don’t buy that their relationship is at all stable. We need to move on to Kizzy.

Oh, Kizzy.

Kizzy is our “Romany gypsy” (in quotes because it’s said like twice and means absolutely nothing), also known as “the town witch.” She’s our guide (not Allie’s Spirit Guide, that’s Trilby, don’t get this twisted) and the one who gives Allie the titular moonstone, having knowledge of the prophecy of the Starseekers and the Trimarks. She gets started on Allie’s training (and I’m afraid to admit this, but it’s mentioned that Kizzy finds Stephen King’s Carrie to be a “crucial part of [my] education” and I actually did find that kinda funny) but is then comatose for the rest of the book, because that’s what you do with your wise old mentor.

Introduced with Kizzy is her adopted daughter, Carmel. The “adopted” part is important because I guess it’s meant to justify the fact that Kizzy obviously prefers Allie and kind of treats Carmel like crap—maybe this is because Carmel is kind of a bitch to basically everyone, but you have to wonder if some of that is from growing up being named Carmel.

(I’m sorry to all the Carmels out there but…come on.)

Anyway, she’s kind of tangentially relevant to Revelle, a government(?) agent who is actually a Trimark and looking for the moonstone. He’s not super threatening, but he is a pain in the ass for the majority of the book.

I almost forgot Trilby, Allie’s spirit guide whose eternity is spent in a spiritual version of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport which is the only thing interesting about her. She’s a spirit guide and all I care about is the inanity of her permanent existence. I just don’t care.

Now for the kids.

We’re going to approach Allie’s primary love interest, Junior, in a moment but first we have to deal with the proto-love interests, Matt and Cory. When I say, “proto-love interests,” I mean it with regards to how this narrative appears to have been written. Allie starts off with a crush on Matt (who she refers to as her cousin, but it’s fine because they aren’t blood related so calm down guys, it’s super not weird), and Cory is kind of a bully she hates but begins to get to know. The way this story is structured, it seems like the author wrote the introductions of all three before she decided on who the final love interest was going to be and, once she settled on Junior, did not bother editing for cohesion so that it doesn’t feel like I’m able to tell that these two characters were false starts.

After their introductions and a scene or two with Allie, Matt and Cory disappear. Like, they’re barely in the book, despite being introduced as main players. After about page fifty, it’s just Allie and Junior—and it’s fine to have multiple options, but it doesn’t read that way. It reads as something that started off one way, went another, and nothing was changed to make those false starts work with the narrative. It’s just not done well, and it’s frustrating. And if you haven’t noticed, a lack of editing is a primary theme in these posts.

Now Junior. Oh, Junior.

Junior is creepy as fuck sometimes and sometimes almost sweet, he’s kind of bland but is the only person Allie has aside from Kizzy that seems to give a shit and so, in spite of myself, I was rooting for him. But it was hard, because not only dohe and Allie have creepy interactions like this

We also now need to address Marilee Brothers’ relationship with latinx people. It’s a rough one. I’ll just put a couple of examples…

Yup.

oof.

yikes

oh boy.

Allie’s two friends Manny and Mercedes suffer from this kind of treatment too, but the way she writes Junior’s mom just feels gross.

Let me just say, to start off: I’m very white. Almost ridiculously so. But I also spent my childhood and basically most of my life in Southern New Mexico which, you guessed it, is a primarily latinx area of the country. So seeing this is kind of disconcerting. Disconcerting because from what I could gather, this woman either is or was a high school teacher. Even in Washington State I doubt she had an entirely lily-white class or absolutely no opportunities to learn how to write people belonging to other cultures in a way that isn’t so goddamn disrespectful. Maybe I’m overreacting, it’s not my place to feel this kind of anger on others’ behalf so I’ll only touch on this in this part. But this is why I don’t feel terrible naming the book or the author, because what you wrote is bad and you should feel bad.

Now let’s move onto Diddy.

When this kid’s mom introduces him on his first day of school, she insists they call him by his Christian name Didier Ellsworth Thomas the Third—which, listen, if I could give a wedgie to any book character—but of course he goes by Diddy, because that’s somehow less stupid. It’s dumb. I’ve come up with fun names and then made characters around those names, definitely, but it’s something you should absolutely workshop because oh my god. And you made this kid a villain.

Yeah, Diddy’s a Trimark. That’s how it’s approached in the book as well, except sometimes he’s a Trident because she forgot the fucking name of her Big Bad Evil Group.

Are you fucking kidding me.

Why am I so mad about this? Good question. Excellent question. Diddy suffers the same as pretty much every other named character in that he is introduced and then reappears when needed, but is given nothing to aid in giving him relevance to the plot. He feels like the author didn’t have a villain character so she plucked one out of her roster. That’s fine to do, but I’m not supposed to be able to tell you’ve done it. I can see the strings, Marilee, and I’m not happy. Your villain henchman should not feel like an afterthought. And when this is revealed, Allie seems betrayed, and I guess that’s what’s getting me—he’s in the book so little, I don’t for one second believe she would give a shit. I just don’t.

Listen, the takeaway from this post should be that, as a writer, you like creating characters. Sometimes you create too many, because you’re populating a world and that tends to happen. These are all fine, but listen…you absolutely can have too many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak. You need to condense and use those characters properly, in a way that makes them people and in a way that helps the story develop. They can ruin your story just as much as they can help.

What I’m saying is…you’re not too good for an editor, and you will never be too good to look back at your damn story and revise it.

Next up, we need to talk about Allie.