The hero of my current wip is to whom I refer. Aoife Mccrae has dodged and pushed and forced me to do some massive rethinking every step of the way in this story. A few of those dodges I'm not going to mention because they're, hopefully, surprising plot points! Or, at least entertaining ones.
Now, all of my heroes toss me about some. I don't mind. This time, it's made this ms SO SO SO hard to finish. I've been trying to type The End on the first draft for almost a year. For me, that is a very long time. First drafts usually take me 6-8 months.
I think I worked so hard on The Mad Baron's Doomed Daughter there was too much of it left in me when I started Widowed Witch of the West. Aoife's been fighting some of my decisions and she's totally correct. Only, now when I do get to type The End it's way more of a beginning than normal. I do a lot of editing and adjusting as I go so my first draft is pretty close to a final one. Other than finding all of those pesky grammar errors I can't purge myself of no matter what.
This time, I'm going to have to take what I know from the end and be sure it threads all the way back to page one. I've done this some already when I had the lightning strike of character motivation two months ago. I've redone my playlist for this book and have gone with a strictly Aoife-based one instead of a story one. It's really helped me get my head where it should be for her.
Also, this has gotten a tad bit darker. Like, umm, death under cow corpses darker. Well, cow corpse. Only one. The next version might be darker still.
Still only the one cow corpse.