Finding a Voice

I don't know what happened, I don't know what I did differently, but I think I've finally found the voice I want for The Witch of November.

I can't even really explain why it's different from what I'd written before. It's not as verbose and a little funnier than before. I also think I've managed a nice balance between the adult voice for the narrative and just a touch of kid voice to give the prose a punch.

Have a snippet:

“I’ll be right back,” she muttered, more to herself than to Charlie. All right. She could do this, right? It shouldn’t take more than a minute to find the ball and squeeze back through the fence and she could totally handle sixty little seconds. And besides, the longer she stood there thinking about it, the more nervous she’d be. A rescue mission like this needed to be done quickly and without thinking. Kind of like ripping off a Band-Aid.

But then again, she’d always been afraid to rip off the Band-Aid super-fast.

Rolling her eyes at herself, she gave Charlie a small wave and took off for the back yard. The next time Charlie fired the ball over the fence, he was going to have to be the one tromping into the Witch’s yard to get it back. Even if he called her a chicken on top of calling her a baby.

The plastic ball had rolled to a stop a couple inches shy of the wooden deck attached to the back of the house. Oh, Charlie so owes me an ice cream for this, Allie thought as she dashed forward and wrapped her hand around the ball. A real ice cream sundae from Sweet Indulgence, too, not one of those little treat things he usually got from the freezer at the 7-11.

“Hey, Allie!”

“I’m coming!” she hollered back. Cripes, that boy had no patience. She hadn’t even been gone a full minute yet! What more did he want from her? “Relax! Jeez.”

A flicker of movement in the dining room window stopped Allie dead in her tracks. Oh, holy crap, if that was even the Witch … that one little glimpse of her from the safety of the lot across the street had been more than enough, thank you very much.

It still needs work, of course, but it's reading more the way I want it to now. Which has turned my "There's no way in hell I can do this" into "I just mght be able to do this!"