Back.
Well, depends on what I'm working on at any particular moment. Redesigning Eva, I think, was borne out of my struggle with depression, and as a result it can get dark to the point of being overkill, almost wangsty. The problem with the first draft is that I got masturbatory (wink!) instead of focusing on a coherent, attention-grabbing plot. But enough about that nightmare of a project.
When I'm writing, I try to get myself into a trance. I attempt to put myself into the shoes of the point-of-view characters. I ask myself a lot of questions. Where am I? What's my motivation? What's going to happen to me? I also like to put a lot of emphasis on the dimensions of my characters. I try to make everyone in a story, no matter how small, seem rounded. I'll use Sean "Alphaboy" Gillespie and his adoptive parents, Joe and Mary, as examples. I've been doing some work on their backstories and personalities. Let's strip it down to the basics. Sean is a nice kid who loves Joe and Mary, and they love him back. That's fine, but they need to be spiced up. Sean's polite and affable, sure, but he feels like an outsider because of his powers. The Gillespies all love each other, but they have their disagreements. Early in the story, on Sean's first day as a high school freshman, Joe insists that he drive him to school rather than letting him fly there. The boy has already amassed a reputation as the town's "freak", much to the concern of the Gillespies. Also, Joe and Mary may be great parents, but their not without their oddities. Joe is a shell-shocked, cynical ex-Special Forces operative who fixes up people's houses for a living; war has hardened him and wrecked his optimism, and sometimes comes off as a grumpy middle-aged man. Mary, an ER nurse with a cleft palate, is an absolute teddy bear to Sean, perhaps a little too much: both Sean and Joe agree she needs to pop her teats out of his mouth and let the former become a young man.
Phew, that's a mouthful. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I want my stories, no matter how weird and fantastic, to have a stamp of honesty.