Nothing is ever as it seems. (Or….So your daughter has a blog…)

I have a blog. Perhaps you have a blog. It seems these days that everyone has a blog. So that my daughter has a blog should have come as no surprise. After all, she’s 13 and lives on the internet (albeit in a variety of post-modern chat personae).

Still, though, it isn’t what one expects to find while sitting in an internet café. I bookmarked it, much to her chagrine. There isn’t much there, really. Just ramblings about FF-X and whatever anime she happens to be hooked on this week. But still, that she has a blog, goes out, and posts on it…and I knew nothing about it!

The things you never know about people–even those closest to you. Right now, I’m working on adding ‘character conflict’ to the book, getting it ready to go to an agent in Colorado. For those of you who don’t know, character conflict has to do with the interactions between people…those vague sets of circumstances that seem to scream “hey, you don’t know why, but we’re fighting!”

It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do and I’ve been relatively stumped. But it has gotten me to thinking lately about the people that I think I know. I really don’t know them and they don’t know me. They know the interactions–limited and brief–that they have had with me and I share the same interactions with them. But do we ever really know someone?

It kind of reminds me of a play I saw once called Second Samuel. It’s about a little boy, mildly retarded, who lives in a town called “Second Samuel, Georgia.” General Sherman burned the first one so they rebuilt the town. It seemed that the little boy’s favorite person, whose name I’ve forgotten, died. And come to find out, SHE was a he and the only person in town who knew was the doctor. Go figure.

Betrayal finds its root in character conflict. That’s why it hurts so bad, I think. People change, yes. But it’s those moments when people *haven’t* changed and yet they still hurt you that cause the deepest scars. After all, you didn’t know them, did you?