our heroine

Our Heroine: a partial introduction

When we meet Kielle Hughes, she has just finished the novel she quit her day job to write. It’s in the hands of her agent, and the waiting is killing her. She takes the Praise Caravan job as much as for distraction’s sake as anything else, although of course there’s that nagging work ethic in the back of her head that says she has to be doing something demonstrably productive, with a steady paycheck, or she’s a bad person.

Kielle has some misgivings about the Caravan from the start. For one thing, it’s a contemporary Christian ensemble, and Kielle is not a Christian. Not anti-, but definitely not Christian. She’s Taoist if she’s anything, but that’s philosophy, not religion. So she’s not sure how well she’s going to get along with people who are totally into Jesus. She’s also not convinced that people who say they’re into Jesus actually practice what he preached, having had some negative experiences with that sort of thing in the past.

Riding on the tour bus is going to make Kielle insane. She’s a hermit by nature, one of those writers who can hole up in her garret for days on end without feeling a need to speak to anyone. Yet she has signed up to spend her days trapped on a bus with people she may not like and her evenings surrounded by crowds in the concert venues. Her only alone-time while on tour will be in her hotel room late at night when she’s too wiped out to enjoy it. And forget crawling into her cave when she’s not on tour; all her friends at home want to spend time with her while they can. What the hell was she thinking?

Kielle has a few tools to help keep her sane, though. She’s a devout student of T’ai Chi, an internal-style Chinese martial art she studies for both health and self-defense. Her meditation practice is vital to her sense of well-being, and the physical activity helps a lot as well. Also, she writes. Constantly. She maintains a road blog for the tour, a public blog to keep her family up to date, a private online journal open to a select inner circle, and active correspondence with several friends. That’s in addition to the pen-and-paper diary she keeps — in Portuguese or something, just in case anyone peeks.

Another interesting thing about Kielle: she as a photographic memory. This will become vital to the plot (once I figure out what that is). She remembers everything she sees or reads and most of what she hears, especially if she visualizes the words as they’re being spoken. She has taught herself to read lips, too, and is not above eavesdropping that way. That will put her into more than one tight spot re: knowing things she shouldn’t and needing to keep quiet about how she learned them.

Interesting aside: Since she had such an easy time memorizing rote material, during college Kielle scored the occasional easy money by taking tests for other students. And she never felt particularly bad about it.