The Love List!

Today, for their Road Trip Wednesday question for bloggers, YA Highway asked: Inspired by Stephanie Perkins' post on Natalie Whipple's blog, what is your novel's "Love List"?

Stephanie calls a  'Love List' a list of those ideas that sparked the fires of my mind. The Love List for ‘Rebel Against Heaven’ is not quite a happy and light as Stephanie's, which is probably to be expected when it's not a light or fluffy novel. But it's fun to remember all the things that stirred my passion for the story:

• Showing an extremely damaged, hurt and angry character fight to redeem himself.  This is definitely one of the core concepts: a ticking timebomb of a guy who’s about to self-destruct and bring everyone else down with them.
• Nice suits
• English accents. Early draft Tyler was extremely posh, stilted middle class. Now he’s still middle class, but coarser and angrier.
• Angst. Lots of angst. Buckets of the stuff.
• Revenge
• Justice
• Japanese Anime
• Christian mythology and the non-canon works that expanded the world (Dante’s Inferno, Paradise Lost and the Book of Enoch)
• Flying (and the theoretical science behind it)
• The ‘Murmuration’ video
• Booze!
• Complex romantic relationships and friendships, something different from the tired love triangle set-up.
• Lots and lots of My Chemical Romance songs. (I REGRET NOTHING.)

And here's the love list for the work-in-progress I like to refer to as ‘ giant robots and the girls who fix them’. It's bound to get longer (and, knowing me, darker) as the story evolves:

• A very different kind of monster
• Badass ladies doing male-dominated jobs
• RAF Kinloss
• Computers and the IT industry
• GIANT ROBOTS
• Scotland, the sea, and the Western Isles
• Scottish accents and Gaelic
• Creepy manipulative, controlling YA love interests getting the punch in the face they deserve.
• That self-assessing, self-dissecting part of being a teenager where you’re trying to figure out what defines you and how the rest of the world will see you.

Looking forward to seeing all the other love lists being posted today. :)