{"id":42,"date":"2011-03-19T19:55:20","date_gmt":"2011-03-19T19:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/?p=42"},"modified":"2011-10-19T11:29:01","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T16:29:01","slug":"stalking-marnie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/?p=42","title":{"rendered":"Stalking Marnie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings to my new readers.\u00a0Before we begin,\u00a0I offer you the following pro-tip: Zombies can’t crouch, and they’re piss-poor climbers. How do I know this? I have bad knees. But AJ, what the crap does that have to do with zombies, you ask? Follow my logic: zombies are reanimated dead people. I am alive. Therefore, no matter how bad my knees are, they must <\/em>be better than dead knees, no? Humour me, or rub this Ben Gay clockwise on my kneecaps. Choose wisely, my friends.<\/p>\n

Point of View: First Person<\/strong><\/p>\n

As\u00a0the author of a deeply-flawed protagonist, I’m compelled to\u00a0dig pretty deep into the crudpuddle of humanity to get my head around some of her knee-jerk reactions.\u00a0Many writers will tell you, sometimes a character shocks the hell out of\u00a0 her author. My main character, Marnie Baranuik, is an ex-pro psychic,cookie addict and the reluctant guardian of a fussypants vampire. She’s\u00a0more Mr. Magoo than MacGyver,\u00a0is under no illusions about\u00a0it and makes no apologies for it.\u00a0I try to make her more heroic, I really do, but it never feels right. And bihourly\u00a0(or, on a day when I’ve\u00a0indulged my vein-shuddering need for\u00a013 X-large Tim Hortons teas and a 6-pack of Apple Fritters, on an every-other-minute basis) she manages to make me choke a little on my tongue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(Side-note: wondering\u00a0for the first time\u00a0if there’s a\u00a0measurable\u00a0relationship between author’s caffeine intake and character’s use of the word “fuckspigot”. Will investigate presently.)<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ll sit down to write a\u00a0triumphant scene of her\u00a0kicking evil in the gonads, and mentally will tell this character: “OK, Marnie, bust that shit open and drop his ass!”\u00a0But by\u00a0the time\u00a0I’m done the scene, she’s managed a brief, screaming trip down a hill on a stolen motorcycle and\u00a0executed a textbook face-plant into a hedge. The bad guy is <\/em>dead, but only because she accidentally plowed through him. She did have a fist-fight. It was with a shrub. This does not in any way resemble the mission I sent her on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After a nerd-raging author tantrum (which may or may not involve a dutiful slap across my own face), I reread, struck silent in awe: once again, my character has expressly disobeyed my direct orders and power-slid\u00a0toward self-destruction. How? How did this happen? More troubling, how did this happen without my permission? If someone started a dead pool\u00a0on the likelihood of my\u00a0character biting the big one, I’d <\/em>be able to participate, having no prior information of nor control over\u00a0her misadventures.<\/p>\n

(Side-note: wondering now if there’s a measurable relationship between the degree of free reign Marnie has in these stories and the size of the drooling hole in my brain.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Friends who have beta-read my first\/third\/eight hundredth drafts of\u00a0Touched, Book One of the Marnie Baranuik\u00a0Chronicles<\/strong>\u00a0will tell me “uh, that’s so you”\u00a0(kindly<\/em> imagine\u00a0if you will\u00a0their grand rolling of eyeballs; they are disgusted\u00a0by my\u00a0failed attempts at coolness<\/em>).\u00a0I’m blown away, because while Marnie is geek-smart and funny,\u00a0like yours truly *cough*, her personality is\u00a0often horrible, horrible!<\/em> This makes me wonder, if I’m\u00a0as crass and\u00a0avoidant as Marnie, why are these people my friends? How do they put up with me? Guess I’m not the only fan of jerks.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0also leads me to wonder, if Marnie is some form of me … do I secretly want to go kamikaze on a Kawasaki, get drop-kicked by little old ladies and\u00a0pelt down a dark road pursued by\u00a0a zombie\u00a0dentist with a dick-hole in his chimp suit, punting aside\u00a0the defiled husk that was my pride?<\/p>\n

Actually, who doesn’t? That’s kooky talk.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>(Author’s note: AJ Aalto is currently seeking\u00a0agent representation\u00a0for Touched, Book One of the Marnie Baranuik Chronicles, <\/strong>while completing the first draft of her second novel, Death Rejoices,<\/strong> Book Two of the same. She may also be standing in front of her bathroom mirror, snort-giggling at\u00a0exploratory homemade zombie noises, like all horror writers are wont to do.)<\/em><\/p>\n

(UPDATE: AJ Aalto is no longer seeking agent representation, as the novel ~Touched~ was launched in eBook format in September of 2011. http:\/\/amzn.to\/pR0ifw<\/a> )<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greetings to my new readers.\u00a0Before we begin,\u00a0I offer you the following pro-tip: Zombies can’t crouch, and they’re piss-poor climbers. How do I know this? I have bad knees. But AJ, what the crap does that have to do with zombies, you ask? Follow my logic: zombies are reanimated dead people. I am alive. Therefore, no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,11,14,55,9,8,56,12,4,13],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-caffeine-overdose","tag-creativity","tag-humour","tag-marnie","tag-monsters","tag-point-of-view","tag-stalking","tag-swearing","tag-writing-2","tag-zombies"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1325,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/1325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}