VBT# The Rosie Black Chronicles - Lara Morgan

Today we have with the upcoming release of her new teenage series "The Rosie Black Chronicles" - Authoress Lara Morgan.
This is a series that I am really looking forward to reading as it seems to be along the lines of The Juno of Taris series by Fleur Beale, The Paradise novels by Mandy Hager. A novel that depicts a dystopian world.

                           Synopsis of The Rosie Black Chronicles : Genesis - Lara Morgan - 2010

Genesis is set 500 years in a future in a world where The Melt has sunk most of the coastal cities of Earth, climate refugees crowd the continents and an incurable disease knows as the MalX is taking hold. For sixteen year old Rosie Black, life is a battle to survive – but she hasn’t seen anything yet. When she finds an odd box in the ruins of the old city she garners the attention of a mysterious and powerful organisation known as Helios. They want what she has and will do anything to take it. With her family threatened and only an untrustworthy boy called Pip and the man he calls boss to help, Rosie is going to have to run.

                                                 
                                                          Guest Author Post - Lara Morgan

                   The Boy in this Story: the challenge of creating a male character in heroine driven YA.


There’s a funny thing I’ve found when it comes to the female characters in my stories, most of the time instead of me creating them it usually feels like they already exist and little by little are telling me who they are. I’m just the typist, they’re the story tellers. It’s weird.

And when it comes to male characters it’s just the same, and in heroine driven YA they are important – really important. Having a boy who is likeable and/or desirable can make a huge difference in keeping readers interested.

The first thing I thought of when I was getting to know the character of the boy in Rosie Black’s story – whose name is Pip by the way – is that I didn’t want him to fit too easily into a type that is common in heroine driven YA. Now, when I say a ‘type’ I think you might have some idea what I mean.

Firstly there’s the out and out love interest. He is the supporting character to the female lead, the object of her affections and all roads lead to him – eventually. You can think of an obvious example here can’t you? Hint: pale and able to scale tall trees at a single leap.

Then there is the ever popular good boy versus bad boy, the famous love triangle where the handsome sardonic bad boy versus the handsome morally upright boy. The devil versus the angel – literally in some cases. Examples here are so numerous you can go cross eyed trying to list them all.

And thirdly, there is the other guy, the character who has suffered under what I like to refer to as The Xander Harris Effect. This character is the boy side kick, often the best friend of the heroine, who is allowed a quota of fabulous lines in witty humour but is forever denied the girl he often, of course, secretly longs for.

There is nothing really wrong with these types of boys, but when I showed them to Pip he just smirked and seemed unimpressed. Pip is not one to fit willingly into a stereotype. In fact he is not much willing to fit anywhere someone tells him he should. He is handsome but not conventionally so, he is witty but rarely appropriately and his morals can best be described as falling in the grey area. So when it came to me writing his scenes he was constantly demanding rewrites. He refused to be nothing more than the longed for love interest. (It should be noted that Rosie also thought that idea was dosh. The name’s Rosie not Bella was her reply, or something similar). Pip enjoyed the idea of being sardonically bad but was having no part of being expected to take orders from the heroine, as those types of boys sometimes seem to have to do, and his response to being morally upright can’t be repeated here. When I tried to go down the witty best friend route his comment about Xander Harris was to the effect of That pussy? I’d rather be Spike.

What could I do? I just had to go with it really. So who is the boy in my story? Well, Pip is a boy with secrets he’s disinclined to share. He can be relied on for some things but isn’t always reliably honest and his feelings for Rosie are hard to define. He won’t be setting up outside her window anytime soon to watch her sleep but that doesn’t mean he’s not interested. In short, I think he’s a combination of all the types but defined by none of them. But that’s just what I think, Pip has a mind of his own and anything could happen. After all I’m just the typist and I’m going along for the ride.

                                                     



                                                               www.rosieblack.com