She has waist-length black hair. She wears all black. She is usually wearing a band shirt of a punk or industrial band. She is covered with tattoos and scars, all over her body.

And she’s six feet tall.

Miranda Scholl is a major supporting character in my last two published works: A long Slow Aftermath and The Rise and Fall of Skye Wright. I developed her as a character and made her a love interest in the first book, and then as a dangerous recovering addict and musician in my last work. As I kept writing her, her backstory kept getting more and more complex, to the point where it began to mushroom on its own.

I realized that this character needed her own book. That’s what I’m working on now.

Miranda was a run away teenager, trying to survive on the streets in San Francisco. She became a wild clubber, a brawler, an alcoholic, and eventually a hardcore drug addict. She began working as an exotic dancer and then became an escort, all while feeding her substance abuse with her newfound income.

After hitting rock bottom she decided to clean up, to get clean and sober. A few months after that decision, that’s when Miranda appears for the first time in A long Slow Aftermath. She really came alive as I developed her backstory for the Rise and Fall of Skye Wright, where Skye and Miranda went from brawling enemies to close friends and bandmates.

Miranda, for everything she is, is also a trauma survivor.

Like me.

The first ever artistic rendering of Miranda.
For the cover of her upcoming book Rise of a Devil Girl

Art by Lady-Amaranthyn

Miranda as well as myself are survivors of ritual child abuse. In writing about Miranda, I am addressing a lot of my own unresolved trauma, not only from the non-stop abuse I got from my parents, but also my peers, as I was rampantly bullied in all the various schools I attended.

In creating Miranda and her story I only drew partially on my own experiences. Much of what Miranda has gone through are also the stories of many of my friends, friends who ran away from their homes to escape brutally abusive family situations when they were very young. They ended up living on the street when they were not even old enough to get a job. They were people who not only suffered emotional and physical abuse as children and teenagers, but many were also survivors of incest, sexual assault, and rape.

So many people I knew are survivors of sexual trauma, to the point where, in my teenage and young adult mind, abuse survivors were people who had survived sexual assault. It never occurred to me, for years, that I was a childhood abuse survivor, even though I suffered at the hands of a violent father, a father who split my head open when I was only five years old. Looking back, it boggles my mind that I never saw myself as an abuse survivor. I only realized it after I had done some survivor work with a partner.

In writing about the bullying, the anger, the violence, and the abject poverty that Miranda suffers through, it brings back a lot of memories for myself, memories and feelings that have been affecting my mental health as I work through her story. Feelings of self-doubt and insecurity, feelings that were once always present with me, were suddenly back. Without realizing it, concentrating on this work has brought back more than just memories. It has taken me back to my being an alienated and insecure person, which used to be my default.

This is a work I cannot ignore. I’ve put in too much time and energy into it. I have already paid a price for working on this material. There are many other factors that are affecting my current state of mind. But it’s not just this work that has been weighing me down. The pandemic years have been some of the toughest of my life. During the Covid lockdowns and turmoil, I lost my home, and then I lost my hometown, I lost my living, and I lost my mother.

One of the primary inspirations for Miranda comes from
the late Marian Anderson, singer for the Insaints and
a dear friend of mine, as well as a true inspiration.
You can read about her story here.

I am now set up in a new hometown, in a new home, trying to bring myself back up. I’m slowly re-establishing my income at the same time I deal with everything I’ve lost in the past few years.

Overall, tackling this work has put me in a state of mind without my initially realizing it. I knew it was going to dredge up old ghosts, and I knew it was going to touch on parts of my past that I have yet to work on, even though I’ve come so far in working on myself, ever since I clean up my act and became clean and sober. Indeed, I intended to use this work to help me come to terms with a lot of that baggage.

But I had no idea how much it would affect me.

I truly underestimated Miranda, and her power.

Just another example of what Anne Lamott said. Don’t pretend that you know your characters, because you don’t.

Stories have the power to take you all kinds of places. Usually they’re other people’s stories. The life and times of Miranda Scholl is one of the most complex and challenging things I’ve ever written, and it has pulled me along and affected me in ways I did not anticipate.

It’s not as if I haven’t explored any of these issues before. Skye and Preston, both of whom have been main characters in most of my novels, have had hard and abusive lives. Both were also runaways, taking off and running away from bad family situations when they were just teenagers. In A Long Slow Aftermath Preston fights his own demons as he is newly clean and sober. But even though I have dived into Skye and Preston’s lives, I never dug as deep into either of their souls as I’m doing with Miranda.

In this new work Miranda complains to her partner that she doesn’t know how her own mind works, that she does not know why her soul plagues her with toxic thoughts, bad memories, and morose feelings. She’s still working out her new life without the crutch of drugs and alcohol, and finally facing everything she’s been through head on.

And she’s taking me with her, as she works out her own life.

And sometimes, these characters that I’ve created for my works, they’re almost more real to me than real life people.

Rise of a Devil Girl will be out in November of this year. In the meantime, you can read an excerpt of Miranda’s first ever appearance here:

http://needlepictures.com/tbd/2022/08/25/little-library-encounter/