First Draft: An Attack

I was feeling a bit dry tonight for my nightly attempt to write. So, I started up some Shamen and East 17 (yes, so sue me) and tried to write what came to me. The strange wolf-suited people came back and... well, let's just say that this is probably my worst writing yet on this project. I think I have a handle on the relationship between my female protagonist and her companion better now, but trying to avoid cliche and the modern trappings of gender roles was... more difficult than I thought.

Really struggling with names too. I don't want 'feminine' names per se but I also want to stress the differences in roles within the group. We know that my males have a coming of age where they choose a new name, what about females? I suspect that 'first blood' would be the coming of age... I think I need to write one of those and see what happens actually...

It's been relatively easy to write a more sensitive male character - I just go through ideals - but writing female characters that have agency in the midst of an attack is hard without making the female characters fit tropes for male characters. The little I've read of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has warned me off that as a means of writing 'real' females. Equally, in avoiding fighting and showing awe and fear at the command of fire in this scene, it seemed as though I was writing women that needed saving - which was not the point.

Why is this so hard?

Analysis courtesy of 750words.com - who probably deserve a bit of money from me by now...

Rating: PG - violence (check)

Feeling mostly upset, with anxious following, and concerned mostly about relationships

Mindset: Introvert - Negative - Uncertain - Thinking
I think if the last one had been Feeling I would have nailed this

Time: The Past; Primary Sense: Hearing; Us and Them: Them

29 minutes at 37 words per minute.

Ouch

1,466 words, and they were hard.

Day job has drained me.  And I took a night off it.  So there's more to do in the week on the evenings, when I would write.  I needed 5k tonight.  Or more.

Jeremy and William are split up.  Aixlene has had a revolution.  War is coming.  I write in short sentences.

Total is just over 20k.