No, I don’t know why!  Just don’t bug me, all right!  Gzz, it’s my bad.  I’ll deal with it.

Ah, got that off my chest, kinda.  Here’s the deal, I have this here contract with Kensington Aphrodisia that calls for me writing three erotica novels.  I had #1 under my belt (hardly the first erotica I’ve written) and plowed into researching for #2.  Everything was steaming along.  I had my characters, my setting, the primary conflict (he’s a shape-shifter, she an animal psychic).  I knew that once again it would have capture/bondage elements ’cause that’s what Vonna Harper is known for.  So I started writing, throwing several minor characters into the opening chapters thinking I knew what I was going to do with them.  I figured my heroine’s main characterization hit was that as an animal psychic. she has to take what animals ‘tell’ her and translate that into knowledge her employer can use.  She’s a loner as might be expected of one who barely understands her gift.  The hero was/is simpler.  He’d died a violent death but came back with the ability to shift into cougar form.  He wants himself a woman and goes about it much as a cougar might.

Then came some problems, specifically one big one.  Kai, my heroine, simply didn’t have enough depth to sustain a book especially since we know so little about the hero’s background until near the end.  I didn’t know her backstory.  Yes, being an animal psychic is kinda cool if I do say so myself, but there has to be more than that to her, like what does her family consist of, past relationships, her career, minor things.  Kai’s lack of a background kept nagging at me, but I plowed along.  Every night I’d try to brainstorm what needed to happen next in the story.  I kicked myself to the corner when I realized I only needed one minor character and drove myself crazy trying to decide whether my hero’s (Hok’ee) shape-shifting friend should/could come back to life after he’s killed.  An even bigger issue, I lacked the kind of personal conflict that leads to a satisfying resolution.  What in their personalities threatens to drive them apart?  Duh, I didn’t know.

Then the other night I was watching a news program where a young man spoke emotionally about losing his beloved father six months ago.  His raw pain spoke to me and suddenly I knew what I had to do to Kai.  Instead of having lost her parents years ago, only Mom would have kicked the bucket when she was a child.  She and her father became a family, two people bonded by love and mutual respect.  Then he dies in an accident and, reeling, she walks away from her job.  Some six months later she is trying to pull herself back together by accepting a career challenge.  Now when she realizes how alone Hok’ee is (it’s hard for a shape shifter to have a network of friends, especially when he’s forced to live in the Arizona wilderness), she has to decide whether she’s emotionally strong enough to commit to him.

Just writing this about Kai stirs something inside me.  I care about her in ways I didn’t before.  I want that happy ending for her and for that to happen, Hok’ee has to step beyond himself and do some commiting of his own.

Yeah, this is good.  This gives the whole story emotion. 

The danged problem is, now I have to go back through the whole frickin story and salt that in.  If I’d known this from the get-go, I’d have saved myself a ton of work.

Next time, Vonna, know where you’re heading before you start!!!

Okay, question of the day, has this happened to the other writers out there and for readers, can you tell when a writer hasn’t gotten her act together?

www.VonnaHarper.com