I’ve still only just written half of Book Four’s prologue, half of its chapter one, all of chapter two, and nothing else. While that doesn’t seem like much to me, I at least take consolation in the knowledge that I have a pretty good outline and a really good sense of where the story is going. Yet even with my awesome outline and my keen sense of direction (excepting being inside large buildings like malls), I feel strangely unwilling to really get into the plot of this book. It’s strange, really. But then again, I tend to feel that my novels are more character driven than plot driven. This book, well, the characters are going to be getting on my nerves.

First off, the main character, Solennelle, is going to finally reveal a lot more of her mental demons and will give voice to a lot of the personal issues she has been hiding from everyone yet hinting at periodically. Well, she’ll get most of the skeletons out of her closet, but not all of them. The rest will come out in Books Five and Seven. At any rate, while I’ve been trying to point out in the previous three novels that she has a lot of mood disorders, phobias, quirks, issues, etc., I don’t think that any of the previous novels come even close to the amount of angst in this one. As Ian puts it, it’s like Harry in the fifth Harry Potter novel: whiny little bitch syndrome. I like this character. I really don’t want to portray her as a whiny little bitch, but part of the plot is her moping and thinking about her past and wishing her life were different. I don’t feel 100% bad though because she is a seventeen-year-old girl, and I know how screwed up my head was at that age. Hell, ask Ian. Ask any of my friends from high school. They’d paint a very different picture of me from that time than the smiling face I turned on when I had to. It’s that part of my past that I’m giving to Solennelle, and well, that’s probably part of the reason why I’m dragging my feet on getting into it because that means I have the pleasure of reliving a painful chapter of my existence.

Then there’s the other main character, O. O’s been pretty level-headed throughout the previous three books with a few quirks and a bit of a bad temper, but for the most part, I consider him to be the rock of the duo, more-or-less stable and pretty even-keeled. However in Book Four due to circumstances I’ll not get into here in detail because I don’t want to ruin the storyline for anyone, even he begins revealing the Devil beneath the shark-toothed smile. He starts acting more like his old self, the self who was more emotional and needy before he took Solennelle on as an apprentice. As a result, the two moody people thrown together in a castle working together just start raising issues that are, well, obnoxious. The two of them start getting obnoxious, that’s the word.

So why write them this way at all? Well, because that’s how the story goes. I know, I know, it seems like since I’m the author that I should have some control (or total control) over my characters, my world, my plot, but to be honest, I generally feel that I don’t. These people exist in my head; they live there. They talk to each other even when I’m not writing. They appear in my dreams and have adventures in much the same way I dream about characters from the X-files trying to solve mysteries with people from CSI. They’re characters with existing personalities, complicated pasts, and as a result of being so real to me, they simply must progress along logical and realistic paths. This book is the logical next step in the pair’s working and personal relationships. It has to contain a level of mistrust, anxiety, paranoia, hurt, anger, and sadness because that’s how they are, that’s how this plays out every time I think about my characters and put them into motion in my mind. That I feel only a vague sense of control over my characters and their actions probably is indicative of some sort of mental disorder, but well, I’ve already got a few of those, so adding another will only make for more interesting writing in future novels. Or so I believe.

At any rate, I just felt like rambling for a while about the difficulties of having willful and complicated characters. I mean, to be fair, my plot is actually quite basic and simple when you get down to it. Even the intricacies of the subplots and all that are pretty normal. It’s not like I’m writing a novel about a trans-species love story between a gay dinosaur-man and his hermaphrodite “boy”friend and their daughter together. Nope, nothing like that. Mine’s pretty generic when you get down to it; it’s just whinier than usual. At any rate, I’ve ranted enough for a while. I think I’m gonna try and finish the prologue and chapter one so I can get into the action of the book and past the exposition. Later!