When I was 16, I had a dream that played out an entire horror novel. So I wrote it. Then I stupidly shared it with people before being too embarrassed and shoving it in a drawer for over a decade. Now Chris and I are reading the whole thing, one chapter at a time. Here’s part 1.
This is Better the Devil You Know, book one. It starts at a funeral in Dunlap, Kansas, where a 12-and-3/4ths-year-old girl named Cerebellum Priest (yes, really) swears the dead sheriff just smiled at her. Then an old guy in a cloak and a loincloth crashes it. We also get into why every teen writer has to mention Moby Dick, my semicolon problem, and why I kept writing from a girl’s point of view back then.
Character Development is a comedy podcast where actors perform the stories I wrote years ago (mostly as a teenager), and we roast every word.
New episodes every Tuesday
Bonus content: Patreon.com/VinceDajani
@VinceInFiction on TikTok & Instagram
0:00 Our first multi-part story
0:44 It came to me in a dream
1:22 The prologue: a letter
3:30 The white whale
3:40 Every young writer writes about loving to read
4:40 SparkNotes vs. AI chatbots
6:07 Back to the human slop
7:43 Chapter one: All Smiles
8:14 “My tummy”
10:05 The dead sheriff
11:19 Two spaces after a period
12:30 Salty tears
13:11 Six semicolons on one page
13:50 A ponytail at a funeral
17:30 Heterochromia (thanks, Final Fantasy X)
18:10 The handwritten first draft
20:24 The title: Cerebellum Priest
20:47 Underworld appreciation
23:53 Why she’s 13 now
25:00 I fell asleep reading Harry Potter
27:30 The Bones finale I never watched
28:00 Her mother
31:50 How she got her name
34:50 The curse of Dunlap, Kansas
36:30 “Boxes, clothes and possible food”
37:30 The mustache
39:00 Everything I was working through
40:30 The stranger in the cloak
43:00 The tree with a face
46:00 Six fingers
47:00 “The TV dinner of Kansas”
50:00 Stuffed animals and growing up
53:00 More story or more tangents? Tell us
57:00 How (not) to end a chapter
59:00 Gender, identity and writing as a girl
65:00 Send us your old writing
66:00 Thanks for listening
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices