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I remember now, why I dread having Anita and Richard alone in a room. They have fought for thirty freaking pages. Thirty pages of bickering, squabbling. Crap. Admittedly, it’s not all the same fight. They’ve avoided eachother so well in the last few months that it’s like they saved up. Saved up their grievances in a long laundry list of pain. Not the most fun day I’ve had at the computer, but I did most of those thirty pages in one day. The muse is working hard when you do twenty-four pages in a day. It reads well, and it’s all stuff that they had to talk about if they were ever to be able to be in a room together again and not cut eachother up.
Truthfully, I’d given up on Richard and Anita being civil to eachother. I had thrown in the towel, but they hadn’t. And hey, it’s not my social life, it’s theirs. So we had THE FIGHT. Then Jean-Claude woke for the day and interrupted them. I was grateful.
Yesterday I spent even more pages with the three of them talking together. Sweet Jesus on a stick. But again it reads well, in fact it reads better than I’d ever dreampt for a scene with the three of them alone together. By that I mean, it was much more friendly, and a lot less angry. Therepy is a many splendored thing. Richard formaly, and Anita informally, are using it to help themselves be happier with who they are. Great, right? Right. But the results have surprised me. I don’t know why, at this point in the book well over seven hundred pages, you’d think I’d be used to the idea that I’ve been wrong about every interpersonal relationship in this book. But nope, I thought I had at least this one pegged down tight. Surprise, surprise.
I started NARCISSUS IN CHAINS with the idea that Jean-Claude, Anita, and Richard would be some form of a happy little menage a trois before the end of the book, then Anita got hurt in the first big fight and it all went to hell. Every time I tried to fix her personal life, the way I wanted it, it screwed up worse and worse. So NARCISSUS was the last time I tried to force things. I promised myself I was out of it. It was their lives, they could live them the way they saw fit. But I’m only human and I started INCUBUS DREAMS with some ideas of how Anita’s life would work better. But I was still trying to shove her life into a very narrow box. But do we really want to live in a narrow box, or a wide one? I think wide, and if the notes for the next chapter remain, we’re about to do things that I’d sworn would never happen again, or some of it, ever happen. I actually wrote a bunch of spoilers and erased them. It was me bitching that my characters have taken over again, when the truth is, that when you’re characters are alive enough to totally throw you just be grateful, and buckle up, because it is going to be a bumpy ride.