OK, this journal thing might have its use after all. I might pull this off and beat this weird novel-specific writer's block. A thing I like about my main protagonist Charles is that there is a very few thing that separates him from emptiness, but there has always been. He has never felt comfortable and lazy because he was always threatened to lose everything at any moment. First by his parents, then by the state care system and by the loss of Ashley. What will keep him alive will be his uniqueness. Everyone in the city of Shelter has an opinion about Charles, the state care kid. No one really trusts a kid that had no valid moral structure from his parents or foster family, but the feelings toward his situation are mixed between pity and contempt.
Charles is going to define himself a lot by his relationship to Ashley. First of all, she's another person which everybody has an opinion about. She's one of the driving force of Shelter's teenage youth social life. She holds very successful parties at her house that feeds the small town gossip constantly. A lot of people are going to be jealous of her. Other girls specially. The relationship between Charles & Ashley will be due to false accusations of shoplifting right after he was put in state custody. At first, she will defend him for the principle of the thing (and to take the center stage in the drama), but she will discover a quick witted, intense young man, a person like she has never known before. They will keep the relationship platonic as none of them don't want to break what they got.
Ashley is not Charles's ticket to a better life, that would be too cliché. No, she's going to be his last defense against nothingness. That's one of the main reasons why he'll seek justice (the other being that he'll be a suspect). Ashley will be more of a ghost than a character in the novel and I'm not sure again how I'll tackle it. One thing I know, she won't live past the first hundred pages, maybe even not even the first fifty. I want the reader to know the ghost and appreciate it before feeling the haunting, but I want a lasting impression so she'll speak a lot through memories and perception people had of her.
Crap! I think I'm holding on to something.
