Halfway through the challenge, my main villain is so cruel, I’m finding it hard to write him

Before I go any further in this post, I have massively fallen behind on my updates, so I’m wrapping this one into days 6 & 7 – It’s that kind of a project.

At the end of the first week, I have (some would say inevitably) fallen behind by about 10,000 words. So to try and catch up, I’m intending to pull an all-nighter tonight (Tuesday) and then work through the next day until I eventually collapse on Wednesday evening. My current word count stands at 40,000. A mix of personal stuff and re-drafting had slowed things down over the weekend.

On the positive side, I’ve really begun to like some of the characters I’m writing, which is something I was not expecting in a romance novel. Before this, I would have scoffed at such an idea, having wrongly believed the genre was nothing more than two-dimensional mush wrapped up in three-day old bubblegum. More fool me.

There is one character getting under my skin more than the others though, and that is the main antagonist. Somehow I’ve allowed him to morph into a real villainous piece of sh*t. There’s nothing wrong with having an evil villain (in fact it’s the aim, after all) but I do try and set a limit in keeping with the theme of the story, and this guy is pushing it. I’ve known of a few writers whose characters morph in ways they hadn’t originally expected them to, and it’s always been fascinating to me; as their creators, you’d think we could keep to a rigid set of characteristics and stick to them, never deviating from the path. Yet they always seem to creep out the page with a life of their own.

The other thing I have to keep my eye on is the charity element of this book – I’m donating all my royalties to charity, and therefore any organisation associated with this project is probably not going to want it to be too graphic/controversial. On the other end of the scale, I’m a thriller writer who has never censored himself for anything, so there is a large push-pull going on inside my head right now.

Anyone who might have been following my clues in earlier posts may already have got this, but the majority of the book is set against the backdrop of World War One, which is quite fitting considering the awful events currently taking place in Ukraine and threatening to spill across Europe. The nice thing about writing, especially fiction writing, is how it allows you to shut the door on the outside world for a short time and seek solace in one that you can create anew from your own desk.

In portraying events of the Great War, I’ve been careful not to take too many liberties with history, or with the achievements of those who fought on the front lines, struggling against impossible odds on both sides of the conflict. To that end, I put extra research into some of the key events the story follows in order to maintain some authenticity and realism, and I hope the final product will stand as a testament to the sacrifices made by the generation of my grandparents and great-grandparents.

The speck of light at the end of the tunnel is visible in this project. Yet I still have the book’s front cover to start (hopefully by the weekend) and the front & back matter to do as well. There’s just not enough hours in the day…

Happy writing!