#char: lev

[wordsgood]

me: deep six and everything about it makes me frustrated and unhappy and i don't want to think about it ever again

me: except for lev. we're so happy to have you sweetie. stay forever <3

[wordsgood]

i didn't expect to ever be ready to outline deep six so soon but. well! things happen. i have an external plot column and then character- and relationship-focused columns, so i can make sure everyone has something interesting to do and there are good interactions happening every chapter.

but for Chapter 1, i'm just working on establishing character in the first place, so behold, short lil character blurbs for the four MCs of deep six, the book that used to be about assassin kids breaking free of their brutal home life, and which is now about assassin kids breaking free of their brutal home life and also 3/4 of them are monsters.

[wordsgood]

since I've been writing some silly self-indulgent tma fanfic involving her, I've been having a little Loving Eleventh Hour Renaissance time in my brain

I have flashier POV characters, but lev is just...... she is my special girl! my most specialest good girl who just happens to be a child assassin! she tends to get overshadowed by sixes and chance, who are attention hogs and a lot more obnoxious about their hangups, but there's a reason why, even in the very first draft, when I thought I'd killed her off, she came back to save the day: she's solid ground. lev is the port in the storm. she knows who she is and what she wants and she'll do what it takes to keep it. she thinks quick, she's brutal when she needs to be, and she's so, so smart (she's an engineer, an inventor, an amateur sewist). if chance and the twins are planets, lev is the sun they orbit around.

because even more than all of that - the stability, the self-knowledge, the intelligence, the determination - lev is defined by her love. she defines herself by her love. for her inventions, for any scrap of happiness she can squeeze out of her objectively miserable life, and especially for her brothers. lev looks like the healthy one from the outside, but she is just as unhealthily unhinged about her family as they are (the healthiest one, btw, is sevens). she'll push herself, she'll bend boundaries, she'll go after the one and she'll make the ninety-nine help her. there's old, old guilt underneath her skin, along with a bone-deep fear of being alone. no love is perfectly pure. but she does love them all so much.

lev wants a lot of things to be different - she wants to be happier, freer, less fucking traumatized - but she also knows what she has, and you'll have to kill her before she lets go of it (lets go of them). you can't take lev's family away from her. she loves them too much.

[wordsgood]

finally got a new idea for revamping deep six and my brain has taken this opportunity to like, sit me in a chair and go “we are going to give lev such a hard time and show off her strength and love but also let her get hugged a lot. it’s what she deserves”