This post is approximately 600 words.
In this post, you get to travel far down the rabbit hole. But instead of landing in Wonderland, you’ll land in the writer’s brain, a place as equally crazy and confusing.
As the title implies, I’ve got too many villains in my first book. At least, that’s the perception readers will have. If I’m careful enough – write well enough – I can prevent them from thinking that, but it’s complicated because I don’t want a simple black-and-white story.
In the mix, some win, lose, die, or are redeemed. Some characters might even be more than one of the following:
- the antagonist of the entire series
- the lieutenant – the character that does the bidding
- the manipulator – the deceiver
- the baron – the non-supernatural foil
- the monster – in a traditional story, the dragon to be slayed
- the foot soldiers – cannon fodder
For characters that come and go, interwoven amongst each other’s storylines within a twisty, turny story, it will be easy to lose my readers. In working through the second draft, I find I’m already there. Continue reading