No, not my hair. My mom, who if you follow me on Twitter you are well aware, is the injection of humor, reality and gravity in my life, looked at me oddly when I announced, "I'm going dark!" "Well," she shrugged, "I was hoping you'd go blonde, but if you need to go darker, that's fine. Less roots."
But what I meant was that my current WIP is going dark. I don't know when this happened but all of a sudden all of my work has this edge to it. My current WIP started out very funny, and my MC is still a smartass but I realized as the manuscript took this hard left toward intense and harsh topics that I'm going to break her. It sounds horrible but, as a pantser, there's no way that I a) can stop this or b) could have predicted it. To show how little initial control I have, I changed a little scene in KC and had to delete it afterwards because the intensity didn't match the story or my characters. I made myself lighten up to make it work but other than that, I've apparently crossed over the the Dark Side. It's just what's flowing out of my fingertips right now, and I'm not dumb enough to stop that sort of thing. I'm taking a wait and see approach to this darkness.
I'm also reading dark stuff too. Not thriller, scary stuff because... well, I'm kind of a wuss. I don't watch scary movies, I don't read scary books and I sure as hell don't put myself in the situation to live (write) scary things for months at a time. I never really thought I'd end up writing anything like this, to be honest. Although my friends, (who also get many mentions on twitter) are not surprised. Apparently, I have a dark personality, or at least a perceived dark personality. Who knew?
Anyway, I'm excited to follow where the words take me. I'm hoping this level of intensity is within my skill set... and you know, it may change and still end up the book I thought it would be but I won't know until I finish. I love adventures!
So what about the writers out there? Has your writing ever turned in a direction you didn't expect? Pantsers (or Plotters), how many times have your stories changed before you realized what was happening? Or is that just a me thing?
-Brandy
