Oh Dakota you a ‘muse’ me

I just compled my third novel HARTFORD 1944, and I'll confess to feeling a bit of post-partum depression. After working on it, living it,  for the past three years, and working quite feverishly these past four months.  I dotted my last 'I' and crossed my last 'T' and I knew the time had come to put  Hartford aside. Now what was I was finished, what was I going to do?  Well, I started a new book.

 

It's funny how things work out. I had scarcely put pen to paper than what should land on my desk, in my weekly Dakota Fanning updates, but this picture of a quite lovely dark-haired  Dakota.  At first, the picture is quite a shock and takes some getting used to after watching this girl grow up since 2001.  Where has my fresh faced little blonde girl gone?  Well, she has grown up and become quite a beautiful woman.  Apparently Dakota is a woman who feels the need to break with the past and strike out on her own.  Make a bold   statement and be her own person.

       I finalized the name of my new protagonist/heroine. I think deciding on the name for my character is one of the most important and catalytic decisions I make. I always try to choose a name that offers numerous flexible plot points. I settled on: DARCY DORA O'DWYER . . . Dwyer means  “black” in ancient Celtic. Darcy is cute and sporty, but counterbalanced with dowdy Dora. To further the coincidence, by an entirely unrelated quirk of happenstance  The protagonist in my new book has dark hair, raven hair, almost black is how I describe it. Here's a what I wrote for the opening paragraphs.

Dorcha hated her hair. The girl sat in front of the mirror with her scissors. She gazed at her face in the glass, the face that looked back at her was not her own.  She raised the scissors, poised to cut the first long hanks of hair. Her arms were scared from where she’d cut herself.

 “Jesus loves you, but I don’t.” The first lengths of lustrous luxurious dark brown, almost black coppery hair cascaded to the dressing table. Dorcha cut and cut, she cut the stranger’s hair with a random fury, a spiteful furious vengeance, until her self-destruction was complete. She looked at her face in the mirror; and cried a dry, tearless cry, less of a cry for help and more a cry for vengeance. She felt powerless to punish those who hurt her most so she lashed out and hurt herself instead.

“Happy birthday Darcy O’Dwyer.” She felt black, even her name meant “black.” A black soul to go with her black hair, sixteen-years-old today and Dorcha couldn’t have felt blacker.

  “Satan is your father.” Dorcha repeated, and she sheared another hank of hair from her head. Satan really was her father.  She thought of her father downstairs; he was back from the pub for sure. She’d heard the cellar door slam. He always came in that way, he thought himself clever, the way he came through the cellar thinking no one would notice.  But he always forgot and tripped on the stairs letting the cellar door slam announcing his return, riotous, belligerent, and drunk as a lord from a night of playing cards. How much did he lose tonight? He was down there no all right, sitting naked, watching telly, plastered, shit-face drunk in his ratty chair.

Oh how she hated him. Not all the bruises on her arms were self-inflicted. Would he come for her tonight? Dorcha continued cutting until her poor shorn locks resembled a dishevel cabbage. Maybe now she was too ugly to be of any interest to father. The lousy lout of her father and her lush of a shrew step-mother they could all rot in hell!

    Darcy what have you done?

 

A KILLING IN ENNISKILLEN

© 2012 by Steven McAllister

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