my time alone or thinking about a family that is not mine but is, but isn't

i am not making the most of this week, sure it's only tuesday but i can already feel myself giving in to the slack. i had fried chicken for dinner last night, for goodness sakes! not good fried chicken either, fast food fried chicken that i will not give name to because i will lose the last shreds of respect anyone in the world ever had for me in the first place.

then america's next top model was the highlights show, damnit, and i didn't even turn off the tv and use that gifted hour to write, no, i found a repeat of SVU (with henry winkler as a bad man!) and watched that. but i barely even knitted and i still have two and a half scarves to go before my chrismukkah knitting is complete. dismal.

tonight is the pub quiz, but i have an hour and a half of solitude beforehand and i must not waste it. i did make up for things a little bit by writing on the bus today, but not enough, so tonight there must be more. if i'm not going to sleep well anyhow, then why bother trying at all. especially when i have the lives of the Atwood and Bernard families to sort out.

speaking of, the Atwood family, i don't think i want to keep that name? any suggestions? the family first names are Steven and Theresa (parents) and Charlie and Amelia (kids, 18 and 15 respectively) really it's the name Amelia Atwood that i like the least, so i need to either give them all a new last name or her a new first name. not sure which yet.

steven is still eluding me as a character. i can't figure out how his personality should be. sharlie remains sort of bland, i need to give him some fire and even some anger. theresa, jess and amelia are going well, but i think that's because i was working on them before. the bernard parents are coming along but i need to really fight against making them caricatures, in my head i see them in an old style english editorial cartoon with the title "The Bad Parents" on a banner above their heads. i don't like them but i need to make them real. i need to figure out how they got to this point. they must have been happy and in love with each other once, they must have been excited about their child at one time, how did they get to this moment when they can barely look at each other or her? what brought them to it. i need to boil it down.

a good thing though, writing in third person has been easier than i imagined it would be. i always always always write in first person and i am sort of pleased with myself for taking this on in third person. i kind of want to give the narrator more of a voice but i'm holding back right now, that's a stylistic choice i can make later, right now i would probably get bogged down.