I know, right? Two posts in one day. This is going to be a pointless and boring blog. Feel free to not read it, but damn it, I just have to do some brainstorming and there's something about doing it in blog form that provides extra clarity.
And I don't have much time because Keith's family is all coming down-surprise-for tonight and possibly spending the night, so the next twelve hours will be complete chaos and noise.
Ok, here's the g.d. problem:
I have to keep building the suspense, otherwise the story is pointless. It's just an exercise in writing, then, and not a story.
But, in order to build the suspense, I must continue to have weird or eerie or symbolic things happen in their lives and therein lies the problem:
Ceallach is such that once those things happen, he won't sit around waiting for the denouement, he'll go storming away and head the problem off before I have a chance to bring the damn plot to a head.
I guess this is what they mean when they say, My character ran away with the story. I mean, I made him that way, damn it, so it's my fault. Now, either I have to deconstruct him, which I won't do, or I have to keep him in the dark.
Ok, to keep him in the dark, that means that either Phillipa doesn't tell him or doesn't notice either.
I keep leaning toward Phillipa not telling him. She has motivation. She knows that he will up and go back to Tir na nOg and that this time he absolutely will not take her. She could hide her suspicions as the months pass.
However, this makes her fully responsible for the loss of their child. And that's too much trauma for me to want to write though. I can't deal with that level of guilt.
So that leaves me with the last option I can think of; writing about things that neither character notice, but that the reader picks up on. Needless to say, this is absolutely the most difficult course of all.
For one thing, it's in first person. So how the hell can I describe something through Phillipa without her realizing what she's looking at, but still make it clear to the reader?
Maybe I can do that once, but to do it over and over again is way over my head.
So I'm just stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck.
I could go back and have her not tell her dream to Ceallach, which would not tip him off, which would leave the possibility open for a few more weird things to go down before he took any action on his part.
Or I could involve them in an aside plot. I keep wondering about this. But those stupid side plots never pan out.
Or I could simply fly right the hell through the nine months of pregnancy, just skim right the hell over and only dive back into the story, in detail, after the baby is born.
That might work. What the reader doesn't know didn't happen won't bother him or her. (Probably her. If I make it at all, my readers will probably be all middle aged housewives with a hankering to be abducted by a wild man with bulging chest muscles. No doubt my name will appear in raised gold gilt, and there were be some soft, out of focus snap shot of roses on the cover. God. Please no.)
Alright, ok. I'm going with the skimming idea. I have to go back and do some major reconstruction and figure out where the hell to cut and run.
Over and out.
