My Favourite Female Characters

The last few posts have been quite serious, so I thought I would tell you about my favourite female characters that I’ve written thus far. Now, these aren’t going to be listed in any specific order, they’re just my top five and a few honourable mentions. Now, to be fair, I view my characters as extensions of myself and also like my books are my children, and this is why I’m not specifically ranking them in order, because that feels mean. 

First, I want to start with the honourable mentions. The first honourable mention that I’m making is that of characters I have yet to write, but that I’m plotting their stories. I know that I’m going to love them, but I haven’t actually written with them yet, so they can’t really be on here. The next honourable mention is Cora from The Cora Anthology. I love Cora as a character, but if you’ve read anything else that I’ve posted about that series, she’s not entirely my character, and that’s why she isn’t one of my favourites. I still love her, but she’s not later on in this list.

The first character I want to talk about is Selena from The Cora Anthology. I actually loved writing with her so much that she got her own spin off novel, so clearly she’s one of my favourites. One of my favourite things to do with my characters is digging into their psyche and the psychology behind why they would do certain things, and Selena was the first character that I really got into this. Since she was an antagonist in “Cora”, I loved figuring out why she would act the way that she did, and I actually ended up really resonating with the character. Not her “evilness”, but just the fact that she was grieving a relationship she really treasured, and how it made her desperate to fix it. It was a very relatable experience for me, which is a weird thing to say, since I was the one that wrote it in the first place, but I think her motivation is one that a lot of people can relate to. 

The second character I want to talk about is Tessa from “Love Through Agony”. Tessa is probably the most authentic character to me, so it makes sense that she’s one of my favourites. She was also the first character that I wrote about having my chronic illness, so I feel very connected to her. I had a lot of fun writing about a fictionalized version of me, and I gave her some of my lesser known traits, like the fact that I used to spend hours designing dresses when I was younger. She also loves true crime and cuddles, which are also some of my favourite things. As I’ve mentioned before, her experience with endometriosis was very authentic to mine, and I was writing representation for myself that I felt was lacking, so naturally, I just love Tessa, and I’m really excited to return to her in the sequel to “Love Through Agony”. 

The third character I want to talk about is Nora from the “Healing x3 Trilogy”. She’s the character that I’ve probably spent the most time on. See, the books of this series are longer than ones I’ve previously written, but I’ve also spent a lot of time behind the scenes with her. I love Nora, since she’s also a pretty big reflection of myself. And I love the journey that she goes on, in the sense that she’s learning to love again after a not so great experience with it in the past. I also wrote about her parents dying when I was spending a lot of time away from my parents, so the grief that she was feeling in regards to that was incredibly authentic to what I was feeling at that time. I love that those novels are long, since it gives me so much time to spend with her as a character, and I can’t wait to see where I end up taking her in the remaining two books of the series. 

The fourth character I want to talk about is Catalina from “The Publisher’s Cowboy”, which is the novel I’m currently writing. Catalina is really witty, and she’s hardworking, which means that she knows what she wants and how she’s going to get it. She’s independent, yet she’s learning to open up and rely on others. Moral of the story, she’s who I want to be when I grow up. She works in the writing world, and has a cat companion…like I said, I want to be her. She also has endometriosis, but she’s successful despite that, and I love that for her. I’ve had a lot of fun writing with her, and I can’t wait to share her with you. 

The last character I’m going to talk about is Finnley from “If This Ends”. I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about characters that I haven’t written with yet, but I love Finnley so much already. She’s an intense worker on her passion projects, is fiercely loyal to her best friends, is going through a breakup that’s really confusing for her, she’s a dancer…Finnley really feels like various versions of myself that have been combined, and I really like that about her. I don’t have much to say about her yet since I haven’t written with her, but I can already tell that I’m going to love her. 

So, there you have it. My favourite female characters that I’ve written. I’m probably going to have to come back and edit this list in the future, but as of right now, there are my favourite ladies. Be sure to come back next week when I share with you my favourite male characters I’ve written. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C

Writing About My Chronic Illnesses

Hi friends, welcome to stories with your friendly neighbourhood chronically ill friend. Not actually, but I thought that this week we could talk about my experiences writing about my chronic illnesses, of which there are multiple. 

First and foremost, I’m going to start with endometriosis, since that’s the one that I first started writing with and the first one that got diagnosed. For those of you that are unaware, endometriosis is a condition where tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows on other parts of the body. It is not limited to the reproductive organs; endometriosis tissue has been found on every organ in the body, including the brain. The reason I’m so specific about the definition of this condition is because I’m sick of misinformation being spread about it, but we’ll get into that later. (Quick aside: I usually refer to endometriosis as endo as it’s easier to say and type.) Anyway, I first started writing with a character who had endo before I was actually diagnosed with the condition myself. My doctor suspected that I had the condition, but I was waiting for a diagnostic surgery. While I was waiting for that, I started writing “Love Through Agony”, where Tessa was on her own journey of getting diagnosed and living with endometriosis. That novel has a very special place in my heart, because Tessa is just an extension of me, and as established in last week’s post, writing this novel helped me survive my journey with endometriosis. After that, I kind of took a break from writing characters with endometriosis…until the idea of writing a long distance modern day cowboy romance entered my head, and I mean, hey, why not complicate it further by making Catalina have endo? What’s really interesting about this novel as I’m writing it is the idea that Dallas wants to be there for her, but due to the distance between them, he can’t always be there for her in the ways that she needs. His best friend, Bo, is also the negative voice in my head that tells me that I’m faking my illnesses, so that was also fun to play with. Plus, Catalina is in her mid twenties dealing with the pain and has been for about the last eight years, so it feels more authentic to me now than writing about someone just being diagnosed with the condition.

Secondly, the next condition of mine that we’re talking about is scoliosis, or the fact that my spine is crooked. A minor curve in the spine is normal, but mine is bigger than what’s considered normal. This is actually one of the more recent conditions that I’ve been diagnosed with, but I’ve been living in constant back pain for the last year and a half, so I feel like I’m kind of qualified to write about it. To be fair, the project that includes this is still in the planning phase (and will be my NaNo project if all things go as planned), but a big thing that came up was the fact that Valerie is very reserved in telling people that her back hurts, since her pain was invalidated and it hurts all the time, so what else is new? I will say, I learned it’s very comforting for me when my back hurts to have someone rub it for me, even if it doesn’t take the pain away, and you bet your buns that Archer does that for her. As established last week, I write the characters I need. Honestly, there isn’t much to tell here yet, since I haven’t written the novel yet, but make sure to check out my post about what I’m doing for NaNoWriMo 2024, since I’m going to be teasing more details about this project there. 

Next, we’re going to talk about migraines. Ugh. Mine were actually medication induced, but they were terrible, and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone. Well, except one of my characters. In a project that I’m still plotting, the main character is a bit of a workaholic on her small business with her best friends, and because I enjoy making my characters suffer, Finnley gets migraines. It interferes with trying to get work done (that totally isn’t based in reality…not at all) and it affects her relationship with her partner because they’re at different places in terms of pursuing their physical intimacy. I wasn’t in a relationship when I decided to give Finnley migraines, but I can only imagine how that would play out based on my experiences with other chronic pain in a relationship. 

Lastly, I do have another chronic illness, but I’m not ready to write about that, both here and in my writing. Just know that it’s the reason that I had to take time off of writing over the winter, and that I do want to write about it, but I’m struggling to actualize that in a romance novel. 

So, I can hear you asking yourself, “What crazy way is all of this kept track of?”. Funny you should ask. You see, I have a notebook entitled the Chronic Illness Girlies, which is where I keep track of all of their medical information, similar to the binder that I as a real person have. First, it talks about their journey with their chronic pain: how the symptoms started, how they got diagnosed, how they cope, etc., just laying the groundwork for what chronic pain looks like for them. Next is the direction of the project. See, I don’t want a character to have a chronic illness for the sake of it; I want it to provide a layer to the character that adds conflict or just generally shapes who they are. So, this section is me taking the idea of a character having a chronic illness and figuring out how it affects the story and why it’s there. There’s even a colour organized chart, because if you know anything about me, of course there is. The last page in each section is how their partner reacts to their chronic illness. If you’re a person with a chronic illness, you’ll know that having a supportive partner is a big part of that, so I’ve figured out what the partner does and how they react to various parts of the chronic illness. This section also has a colour organized chart. 

Now, I said that I don’t want to write a character that has a chronic illness just for the sake of them having it, and I still mean that. However, I wished that there was a book normalizing endo when I was first dealing with it, and so, I wrote that book for myself. My perspective on writing about people with health conditions is the same way I view writing queer characters: why should perfectly healthy (or straight) characters get all of the representation in media? Why not have a character that has a curved spine? It doesn’t damage the way that she can fall in love, and 2% of the population lives with scoliosis (which is about the same amount of people that have red hair), so why not let them fall in love? After all, they’re people, too, and if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times before: the reason I love writing is because I think love is one of the most beautiful things humanity can do, and that doesn’t stop just because someone isn’t 100% healthy or “normal”. 

Writing about my chronic illnesses has been incredibly therapeutic to me, and if I could provide that representation to even just one other person, then that would mean the world to me. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C

Being Emotionally Connected to My Writing

 If you have read any of my writing or any of my blog posts thus far, you’ll know that I am very connected to my writing. It’s a huge part of who I am, so naturally, my emotions are very intertwined with what I write. So, I thought I would share my experience with writing very candidly about my emotions with all of you. 

One of the first ways I knew I was really connected to my writing was my ability to end up crying while I was writing things. There’s really no way for me to talk about this without spoiling some things, so I apologize for that. While writing “Cora”, I believe I cried at least five times. There’s not that many situations that would deem that reaction from the audience, but as I mentioned in my last post, I was very passionate about writing “Cora”, and I think I was a little too emotionally connected to it. It’s also not just sad moments that make me cry, either. Sweet moments between characters also cue my waterworks. Part of the reason that this happens is because my female main characters all have an essence of me in them, and as established, I’m incredibly connected to my characters, so what they’re feeling, so am I. I will not give specific instances that these have come up, but scenes where the love interests have to say goodbye to each other for a while are bad for making me cry, as well as characters grieving the loss of a loved one. Side note, though, I have not killed off an animal, and I have no intention of doing that because A) I think that’s evil, and B) I can’t handle that either. 

Something that has come up recently in my writing is the idea of cuteness aggression. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s the idea that something is so cute it makes you angry; it’s common with animals or babies. But now, my writing is giving me cuteness aggression. Specifically, interactions between Catalina and Dallas in the novel I’m currently writing. At one point, and this isn’t a spoiler at all, he says the phrase, “You feel like home to me, sweet pea.” And let me tell you, dear readers, that I was grinning like a fool as I was writing that phrase into my computer, and I had to bury my face in the cuffs of my hoodie. You know, just writer things. I think the reason that this is coming up so much for me recently is because I had to take some time off from my writing, so now all of the cute stuff is meaning so much more to me. Truthfully, a lot of my earlier Instagram posts were just quotes that made me smile like a fool. I do still post those lines, but there’s some other content peppered in there as well. 

Something that became very apparent to me during the writing of “Love Through Agony” was that I turned to my writing as a form of therapy for myself. There’s something so freeing about dumping all of your innermost thoughts onto a blank page and being able to write back exactly what you need to hear in that moment. I’ve said it time and time again that writing that novel helped me get through my endometriosis. Now, I’m using my writing as a way to deal with other emotional strifes. One of the first posts I made on my blog was about how I fell victim to the easy conflict that is villainizing an ex partner, and that hasn’t changed. But there’s something so therapeutic about writing about a crappy experience with a character that inherently sucks. I don’t make the rules, I just follow them. Back to the actual way this is therapy to me, it was really strange when I took time away from my writing when I was sick. I’ve talked about this before, but it felt like I lost a part of myself. I was going through something really challenging, yet I had no energy to do the one thing that I knew could quiet my mind. I wanted to lean on my book boyfriends, who are another form of therapy for me, but I felt so disconnected from them because I wasn’t writing. It felt like I had never needed my writing (aka my therapy) more, but I just couldn’t do it. 

I wasn’t going to talk about this here, but mentioning them got me thinking about how therapeutic my book boyfriends are to me. If you don’t know, I refer to the romantic male leads of my novels as my book boyfriends, since I’m incredibly connected to them. When I am feeling low or anxious, I can practically hear Flynn’s voice in my head, telling me that everything is going to be okay. Or when I’m in a bad chronic pain flare up, Tobias is right there with me, guiding me through it. When I can’t sleep at night, Vance is with me, trying to soothe me. I know these characters aren’t real, but they are a real coping mechanism for me. This isn’t a new thing, either. Back when I was first dealing with my anxiety as a young teen, Alejandre, who is one of my favourite characters that we’re going to come back to, was a way that I got through it. As he helped Charlotte with her anxiety, he helped me with mine. Tobias helps Tessa with her chronic pain, Vance helps Nora with her sexual trauma…you get the idea. I write the characters I need, even if I don’t know it in the moment. 

The moral of this story is that my writing has gotten me through some of the hardest parts of my life, but it’s also been there when I’m thriving and just have a heart full of stories that I need to tell. Again, my writing isn’t a real person, obviously, but it’s like a best friend to me that never leaves. It keeps me sane and is such a central part of my personality that I don’t know who I would be without it. And there’s something really f**cking magical about that. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C