Vote over at TWC and you can see this week's thumbnails PLUS next week's thumbnails :D. See if you can figure that stuff out... If you checked the voting incentive from yesterday, you'll realize I added a line to Malaya's first comment. I realized she sounded like an insensitive asshole lol. Granted, I don't think most people know how to respond to "My mom is dying and sucking us dry, ergo I'm also dying and life is terrible." So, you know...just plow forward with the conversation and gloss over the awkward parts, as we all do :). I enjoy writing these two having an actual talk, because the undercurrent isn't necessarily antagonistic so much as a mutual "you're the reason I'm in this situation" feeling. When I set out to write this story, I knew I wanted to explore what it meant to have a villain in a narrative. I think, too often, it becomes easy to just write the most comically evil person you can think of and then just beat the shit out of them over and over. Yay, good triumphs! But I've never thought of Aubrey as evil. She's desperate, she's been raised by a real asshole, but she's not evil. Connie, on the other hand...still isn't necessarily evil. She's motivated by her own interests first and foremost, and she's a huge narcissist, but so are a ton of people you meet every day. Connie exists. I've met a ton of Connies. It's just in this instance, she's got the power to turn that mundane, psychological darkness into something a lot more destructive. Anyway, I don't believe in scapegoat, one-dimensional villains. If you're gonna write an antagonist, make them someone worth loathing...which usually means, make their brand of evil something that regular people have actually faced and feel affected by. All right, I got a bunch of comments to check, and I'll get to them in a bit! I have to finish painting my bedroom right now. I'm getting new hardwood floors installed in the early afternoon, so I have to finish before then. (And by hardwood, I mean the real shit. Solid oak, needs to be sanded and sealed...my house is going to smell awful for weeks, but it'll be worth it.) I'm going from bright aqua to...mustard yellow. It's really, really yellow in there. And wouldn't ya know, aqua is fucking hard to cover. I buy expensive, fancy ass paint that should cover everything, but sometimes reality isn't so kind :P. Oh well!