No, I am not done with the rough draft of Star Master Book 2 yet. But I am past one of the sticking points, and hope to be done with another sticking point soon. I wanted to talk to you today about a third sticking point, though…

Pretty much from the earliest outlines this book was going to contain a major disagreement between the hero and the heroine. I knew more or less what it was about, but not all the finer details of why and how this particular subject would hit them hard. And when I sat down to write it, the hero’s attitude kept feeling undermotivated.

I tried everything I could to get at why the heroine’s actions would bother the hero so much, and nothing seemed to work. My characters don’t always tell me what’s going on with them. It’s one of their more uniformly realistic traits.

I had to just leave the relevant scenes like that in rough draft, and hope that I could figure it out later.

Jump to earlier this week, when I suddenly realized that there were some things the heroine needed to do (or rather ask someone to do for her) for “OpSec” reasons, before initiating the plan the hero objected to. And once I realized that the hero might have to be the one to take care of those things for her, I realized what his problem was. The things she would be asking him to do for her are things that he would be extremely uncomfortable with, given his past experiences.

So that’s a load off my mind. It’s going to involve a lot of rewriting (by my standards), but at least I know where I’m going with that subplot now. Just another example of how sometimes all you can do in life is keep stumbling blindly forward, and trust in God and the skills He gave you to make sense of it all later.