My Writing Journey: "The Ghost of Forsyth Academy", Part 2

I'm not much further into the story than the last time I wrote, but I have made some progress. And like always, I am plagued with doubts and worries.

One of the things I'm worried about is that my teenagers don't sound like teenagers. I'm dealing with a lot of issues of grief (probably because I'm struggling with some feelings of grief in my personal life), and I'm worried that I'm approaching these issues of grief from the lens of my own experiences. You might think that's a good thing, but I haven't lost my parents or a child (which characters have lost in the story). I've lost my American grandparents, but they were old and we expected them to die. And the feelings I have surrounding my grandfather's death don't really play in to what I'm writing in the story. I feel bad because I had planned on calling my grandfather the day before he died, then got busy and thought 'oh, well, I'll just call him tomorrow' only to wake up and learn that he had died during the night. I feel terrible about putting off that last call, but that's not something that can be really explored in the story. I'm worried that I'm going to try anyway. The same goes with the grief I'm suffering after losing my church - it's grief, but a different kind, and I want to try to limit how much that experience influences my story.

Boy, that last paragraph was a mess. Can you tell I'm not at the editing stage yet? I've also been a little sick this week - I think the stress of a bunch of things caught up to me and obliterated my immune system - and I can't think, which frankly doesn't bode great for the quality of my writing in the story this week.

I'm 2000 words deeper into the story since the last (first) post I wrote about my writing journey for this book, and I'm just getting through the setup for what should be (hopefully) one of the more exciting plot points in the book. I can't wait to write it, although it is definitely one of the less believable plot points of the story. But this is fiction, and what's fiction without a few risks and departure from reality?