my own habitual heroine Renee Rant

In my recent review of Therese Heckenkamp's Past Suspicion, I included a throwaway line about "my own habitual heroine Renee Rant". Out of the context of my own fiction writing, that makes no sense, but I couldn't resist the alliteration. So I thought I'd do a quick post about young R.R. that I could link to in that review, so that anyone who reads it doesn't think I'm insane.

So who is Renee Rant? I live by the theory that every writer eventually gets a permission slip from the world at large, letting them know that it's okay to start the thing they've been building up inside.

Renee Rant is my permission slip.

As a writer, you'll sometimes have a couple of ideas come to you separately and stay with you, untouched, so long that they blend together and become the same idea. In my case:

- I had a dream about a magic bookmobile that sold jewelry and junk from other worlds. I ran in the house to get my money and when I came back, it was pulling away. Poignant, right?

- I saw a truck in traffic painted like a caravan. I tried to get a picture of it with my mom's phone, but only captured one of the corners. The license plate said Gua Gua.

- In the middle of a stolen spoonful of peach cobbler ice cream, it occurred to me that ice cream was nothing but nature preserved in a really weird way.

And somehow, I began thinking of that bookmobile of mine as an oddly-painted ice cream truck. Somehow its owners turned out to be a poet and a professional madman (although the latter shifted somewhere in the writing process and became an ordinary guy). Now we were getting somewhere.

My poet and his go-to guy needed a passenger, though. They needed someone who, unlike me, wouldn't miss the photo op, wouldn't turn her back and let the Gua Gua pull away. So I took some notes and absently played around with the idea of a female main character, but I never actually wrote a word. It was more of a thing that had dawned on me, which I meant to work on one day, than a straighforward writing plan at that point.

One day, the choir I was in at the time were waiting in a church basement for some kind of performance, and I found myself scanning the walls. The CCD kids had done self-portraits in crayon, and one of them caught my eye. A girl had drawn it--grayish hair, brown eyes, if I recall correctly, lips very red. Renee Rant, read the name.

Renee Rant? What kind of a name was that?

It sounded like a name for a main character, a name that would make me roll my eyes if I read it in a book and say, "No one would name their kid that." Yet here it was. Somebody had named their kid that, which meant it was realistic, which meant I had to use it.

I wrote it down. I kept in in mind. I'm not sure when I realized that Renee Rant was the main character for my ice cream truck story, but she fit it like a scoop fits a cone.

Can I rave about the Rant? She's selfish, she's adventurous, she's part poet and part cynic. She's a protagonist, she's a pair of eyes, she's lazy and innocent and jaded all at once. She's a habit of mine and, hopefully, she might be even a heroine.

But mostly, she's a permission slip.

Maybe some day, if I haven't jinxed her and her story by talking about it, I'll send her your way.