Now it's back to business. I've been doing a lot of work on things in my personal life, which has made it easier for me to get back to my professional life and start writing again. But about a week and a half ago, I ran into a snag. I like to think of it as a character messing up my plot.

In Legacy, I'm setting up so many things that are going to come to pass in later novels and now that I know that, I'm trying to make the most of every single conversation and scene in Legacy so the reader isn't in the dark later on when I reveal things that are extremely important. As I write these scenes and conversations though, I find that some of the situations don't lend themselves to the plot itself. A character is messing up the flow of the story line and it's annoying.

So what do you do when this happens to you? I'm fortunate in that I have a continuity expert and plot partner to bounce ideas off of. When I mess up something, he catches it and reels me in. Then it's back to the drawing board, which means hitting the library. I had to do more research on the culture of Scotland in 1785 to understand what my character would really do. I had to think about the nature of the character himself and find the true motive behind his actions. Then I had to rewrite two pages to make it fit in with reality.

When you go back to the source and think about what a character would really do or what a situation would honestly call for, it's not as bad as you think it is. Also you want to remember one key thing: you can't kill off a character when it nullifies your entire plot. Sure, killing the character off makes the original problem go away, but then you're stuck when you need that character to come back. Or you can resurrect them, but no one will buy it.