PICTURE OF THE DAY

Mmmm, yogurt.

DAILY RAMBLING
Back to the office today, but I'm rather looking forward to it. A bit of mix seems to be best. This time the night was cut short by a wakeful baby at 4 a.m. and hungry cats at 4:20 through 4:45 (I did find my squirt bottle, so retraining has commenced). I don't mind getting up at 5, but anything earlier I heartily resent.

For reasons known only to my subconscious, I am pondering my novel this morning. The overall structure represents a problem, one that lies in wait at the end of the series tapping its foot and saying, "Well? Now what're you gonna do?"

The story is set up thus:

• Prequel. How the bad guy came to be what he is. The action takes place in an entirely other location from the rest of the series, though it is occasionally referred to by him later.
• Book 1. Establishment of heroes and bad guy, mostly in separate spheres.
• Book 2. Development of heroes, major confrontation with bad guy's agents. Ends of course on a bad note.
• Book 3. Continued conflict with more important agent of bad guy, resolution of personal issues from book 1 for at least one hero.
• Book 4. This is the problem. In the current draft, involves prequel characters arriving to join one of the heroes to finally take out the bad guy. Should anyone actually read this far, people may be disgruntled by disappearance of other major characters from plot, but keeping them in results in too many characters who run risk of overlapping. If I rewrite it to leave out the prequel characters, then the prequel is, if not pointless, a lot more disconnected from the rest of the series.

I really have no idea what to do about this. I keep turning it around in my head, and no solution presents itself. I probably will end up axing the prequel, although I may then have to change some things about the other books that might not make any sense. Except that even as I write that I find myself thinking that if you don't know what happened before, then what happens at the very end doesn't make the kind of thematic sense I was aiming for. Argh.

Maybe I can write more in for the other characters to do? Keep them part of the story, separated in space? Hm. I had been planning to just allude to them once in a while, but I'll have to think about that some more.

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