Untitled (Lyrics by Shakira)

Use your mouth / Only to kiss my lips.

"Shut up," he'd say. "No one cares," he'd sneer.

It happened every time I tried to speak for three years.

He destroyed me. Wore me away one sentence at a time.

The worst: "We care," said in his most sarcastic tone. So close to what I wanted. So close to what I craved. But not. Never that. Always: Your thoughts don't matter. Never: What do you think? Never: Good for you. Never: Approval. Never: Affection. Never: Attention.

I craved it. All of it. Care, concern, pride, approval, affection, attention. I got none of it.

I cried in class. Only once. He gloated. Exercising his power.

I never got the benefit of girlfriend status. Makes it harder to believe any of it ever happened. Abuse is always between people who are intimate, related. Not mere acquaintances who just happen to be in the same place at the same time, all the time. Abuse hurts physically. Doesn't just tear up your insides where no one can see you bleed.

I've reclaimed myself, mostly. I found people who give me the attention I craved. I learned to write, told other people's stories if not my own. A cliché: The writer who can tell any story but her own. They've always told me I'm smart, but now they also tell me I'm a good writer. I have all the things I wanted: Care, concern, pride, approval, affection, attention. But I still can't speak.

And never put aside / The things I'm gonna say.

Help wanted.

When I was reading about different careers (I have to figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up, you know) the advice about being a writer was that the hardest part about writing a book is just doing it. You have to, the advice goes, just decide you're going to write and then do it. It's good advice. I never complain about not having time to write, because I just write when I have time, when I want to. I write mostly in the evenings, while I'm watching TV, but I've started carrying around a notebook, and now I write everywhere. I have several ideas for original novels. What's stopped me from writing them is not that I have a lack of time, but that I'm nearly positive I'll never finish them. But now I'm not finishing anything, and I realized that I really do write primarily for myself, so I've decided to start writing one of my ideas, or at the very least, start outlining the characters. This is where I need your help.

1. I have trouble with one of the most basic pieces of creating characters: naming them. I'll take suggestions for: specific names, what makes a good character name, what makes a bad character name, types of names I should or shouldn't use, particularly helpful resources (web sites/baby name books), or anything else you can think of that might be useful.

2. I've decided that since I'm writing this for me, it doesn't matter if I get some things wrong, so I might as well write them British. My idea of research for this is to (re)read what I think of as the British rock star young adult novels. My books to reread are Liz Berry's Easy Connections and Mel, Gillian Cross' Chartbreaker, and J.D. Landis' The Band Never Dances, which actually takes place in New York but fits the general model. If you know of any others in the same vein, please do tell me what they are. If anyone finds the Liz Berry books--either Easy Connections or Mel, or even Easy Freedom, which I haven't read--in a used bookstore somewhere, and they're reasonably priced, say $10 or less, I'd be happy to pay you back for them if you buy them for me.

3. This is related more to the young adult novel than to my desire to write original fiction, but I'm looking for a book I read when I was younger. It's one of those books about the absurdity of high school. In it, the main character has a last name that can also be a first name and which, I think, is the same number of letters as his first name. Therefore, people are always getting it backwards, and he manages to register for classes as both names. In the end, he and his accomplices replace the backwards name with his dog's name, and so his dog receives a diploma. And there's something about a pyramid. It sounds like it could be a Gordon Korman book, but I don't think it is. If you ever read it, please at least tell me I didn't hallucinate the whole thing.