Meredith Mansfield, Author

I posted some time ago about setting SEVEN STARS aside.  I was just having too much trouble with it, which probably meant that I had something wrong or not fully formed.  So, I’ve just been allowing the ideas to come and jotting them down when they did, but not trying to actually write anything on this project.  I’m still not ready to go back to writing it.

The original story was from a novelette that I wrote and never liked much.  It didn’t feel finished, somehow.  So, I decided I knew enough things that could happen to these characters to make it into a novel.  I still think the story will work much better as a novel.  In the process, though, I switched the main character and it just wasn’t working.

This week, I had an idea that would enrich the ending and jotted it down.  And then, at odd moments, I let myself sort of roll it around.  This idea changes everything.  I think it’s part of what I was looking for and couldn’t find when I was too close to the project.  Not everything, not yet, but a good long step down the right road.

The implications of this idea will change the main character dramatically.  He’s going to be a lot less rational and in control and a lot more prone to anger for a large portion of the book.  That means I have to change where the story starts (something I’d pretty much resigned myself to, anyway) in order to show him before he lets his anger get the better of him.  Otherwise, he’s liable to be a pretty unsympathetic character, which is not what I want.  He’s going to be a lot more dangerous, this way, but I think that’s what the story needs.  One of the things the story needs, anyway.

It will also help with developing stronger antagonists and motivations for those antagonists.  They’ll have good reason not to like this guy.

This is definitely going to be a challenge to write, but that’s good.  He’ll be very different from any character I’ve tried to write before, especially as a protagonist.  You’ve got to stretch every now and then.  With this idea, I can actually feel enthusiasm for the project starting to build again.

But, before I even think about going back to SEVEN STARS, I want to finish the first revisions to DREAMER’S ROSE and hopefully get it ready for its first critiques.  Nobody but me has even seen it, yet.  And I’m starting to rack up notes for some significant revisions to THE IGNORED PROPHECY, too.  Maybe, in the meantime, some more story-changing ideas will come to me.