The Blotter Blog: "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

Just wrote the first main climax of the novel.

Not at ALL what I expected. As it seems, one of the characters earlier on actually hijacked one of the major villain-esque roles I had intended to assign to a previous character. And in that, said character also managed to hijack the climax scene with some super completely unplanned villainy and probably a wee too much exposition, and now things have turned out quite differently than previously imagined.

I don't know if it's any good. I know there is going to be A LOT of revising on my part because the nature of my writing serves for such. There's things I need to add and get rid of, and it's been murder forcing myself to continue writing until it's done, rather than going back and revising chapter by chapter as I have every other time I have tried writing this thing.

But the one thing that pleases me above all is the joy I have when my characters decide what I am going to write. If anything, this small character that originally was no more than a placeholder turned out to be one of the most defining characters in the story, and I'm looking forward now to revising his/her role and making her more of a serious player early on. (Sorry I am being so secretive about pronouns, but he/she is one of the major villains in the end, and it wouldn't be nice to give that away, would it?)

I'm pretty happy with this climax as a rough draft, because it's driven straight from the characters and what they would do, rather than me struggling to adjust them around the plot. If anything, I'll have to go back and adjust the plot somewhat to them, which I find fantastic because, for me, it's been about the adventure with these seven characters since the beginning.

(Oh, and I'm not even at the end, and it's already asking for a sequel. We'll see how that plays out once I get it done!)