Oh my goodness, has it been almost a year? Wow. Well, hey, better late than never – Final Answer Chapter 2 has been posted! Go read it before reading this blog, as always.

This series has been an unexpected joy to write across the board, but it’s also got my trademark “very special moments.” In case anyone is worried: no, I’m not making this story another Consequences. The story has some heavier themes, but that’s the heaviest I plan on this story getting. If it gets any heavier, I’ll be as shocked as you are.

This story features a situation that my sheltered self thought was very rare, but sadly, it seems to be kind of common. Even though I have my own demons, I’ll be the first to admit that my parents were nothing but loving and wonderful to me growing up. After getting the all-clear from the commissioner, I ran the story through a couple of beta-readers, and an alarming number of them related pretty directly to what Jason went through when his mother started hitting him. They echoed a similar sentiment as Jason did – their parents could be jerks, but what happened wasn’t extreme enough for them to feel comfortable calling it “abuse” or anything. Still, I don’t want to write a story about what everyone can agree is “abuse,” so like I said, that moment is the darkest I plan on this series getting.

I’m personally of the opinion that you shouldn’t hit your kids, but hey, that’s my inner bleeding heart talking. I wasn’t too shocked to learn as I wrote that Jason’s home life was this, shall we say, unfun – Jason himself isn’t the most empathetic person until he wants to be, and can say things that are a little out of line. Frankly, that’s teenagers for you, and it’s fascinating how whenever I write a teen to be hurtful or stupid, someone will ask, “why is this character is hurtful and/or stupid?!” Like, I don’t want to be the one to tell the commenter that, if my memories are correct, these characters are actually pretty mature by high schoolers’ standards and even that commenter themself was probably even worse in high school, but hey.

It’s been fun writing Jason. Jason is less of an aspiring do-gooder than Adam, and is fine being less involved with other peoples’ business. He’s less reserved than Quinn and is fine meeting conflict with conflict instead of being whiny about it. Jason is blunt and hates overthinkers, whereas every other protagonist of longer stories I’ve ever written have been whiny overthinkers (largely because I’m something of a whiny overthinker myself). In this way, writing Jason has been a huge challenge, and who knows, maybe I’m not doing it justice, but I’m learning a lot about writing other POVs as I do, so I like it.

Plus, Consequences has been so heavy, and intense, and involved. It’s nice to write a high school story about high schoolers doing high school stuff again. Going to clubs and hanging out after school and making out and stuff. These kinds of giddy moments of excitement is what we write, read, and relive high school memories for! Even by that metric, writing the series has been pretty rewarding, and I’m excited for the series’ return. I hope you’re excited too. I’ll talk to you all next week.