I didn’t get much writing done this week, maybe a couple thousand words all week. Part of that was due to real life interrupts and part of it was due to me having to mull over my villain a bit before actually starting to write her. I just came off writing a whole book about Empress Nykostra but it was set nearly ten years before this book. So now I have to age her out and fill in the missing events that brought her to this point in her life.
It’s particularly important to get this character right because so much of the story is driven by her ambitions and her character flaws. She is a person who’s falling apart and taking those around her with her. Which is in direct contrast to the hero, Devon Ardel, who is at the top of her game both physically and psychologically. So the upshot of all this is that I’m thinking hard about the current state of my villain and how best to illustrate this with a series of scenes in chapter 2.
One advantage to doing your whole trilogy in one Plume Creator file is that you can go back and look up things that you forgot about in the other books because they are right there in your left hand menu tree. Very handy.