I’ve been dizzy all day, though I’m not sure why. I’ve tried snacking, it helped a bit. I’ve tried moving around, it made me feel like I was going to fall on my face. I’ve tried resting, but that made me fall asleep (which with two kids running around is a bad idea), so now I’m trying to ignore it and make sure I’m hydrated. I don’t feel anything wrong at all other than being dizzy, sort of like I’m drunk only I haven’t drank anything alcoholic all day. Even before that I’ve had the equivalent of two wine coolers in the last four days, each with dinner. (I love Mike’s Hard Lemonades.)
I have gotten almost 2k done on Stash House, my urban fantasy/thriller (a pack of shape shifter DEA agents bust a drug dealer which leads them on a far more interesting chase than they expected). I have a real good feeling about this story, so much so that I expect The Bloodhounds to show up in a Bloodwalker book eventually.
I’m also completely stalling on finishing Moon Madness. I’m about 20k from the end, and I know what the new ending is, but I’m having a hard time getting there. See, I’ve completely tossed out the one character that made that section of the story. She was two things: 1. A way to show just how horrible the villain was and 2. Set up for a second book starring this character as she tried to get over a childhood of abuse and become something resembling a real person (that’s the feeling I mean, not that she wasn’t a real person just because she was abused, but again, she’s not a real person because she’s a character.)
I think it’s the last part that’s causing me the problem. I don’t need her. She’s overkill. But her novels (which I have already written one and a half of) are… not good. We refer to them as “the shopping novels” because the character comes into a sum of money, and whines about her predicament while shopping. It was written when money was real tight and well, while I tried to make it about more than that, my own predicament come through too strongly.
And now I think the character deserves a real story of her own, but I don’t know how to go about giving it to her (and making it commercial) and I do know what I want to do with other stories. And neither of us (er, if she was a person, but she’s not, she’s a character) is happy about this feeling. But I don’t need her. I have cut her and I just don’t know where to go from there. This character was a shield, something for the main character to focus on that wasn’t the main problem at hand, a way to avoid her problems. And she needs to avoid them because certain other things have to be in place before she comes around and starts taking action. The main conflict is about her being unwilling to do certain things and it takes some pretty horrible stuff to make her do what’s right. So she can’t do it until a certain point, but I have to get the plot to that point without a main distraction now.
See how frustrating it can be when your imaginary playmates don’t cooperate?
