A New Character

For the past few days I've been struggling with Chapter 12. In it, our heroine's love interest finally makes his full appearance. I have some bits and pieces of him in the earlier chapters, but not more than a paragraph here and there. For the rest of the book, though, he's present almost the entire time. One of my editors has a bit of a problem with this. After all, we've had 11 chapters to get to know the heroine as a pretty solitary person and now all of a sudden, we're supposed to believe that she falls in love with this guy we've barely met and he's there for the rest of the book.

Now this is my book. Not my editor's. There's a reason I believe my character can do this...in writing the back story I had a whole chapter at one point with the love interest back when they used to work together, 4 years before the book started. I tell the reader this, but I never show them. I could very easily just tell my editor to get over it, but I respect her opinion very much. She's the most talented writer I know (probably one of the most talented writers I've ever read, - though she doesn't believe me). So I'm going to have to go back over the earlier chapters and add a bit more here and there. I won't go insert the whole boring back story chapter, but I'll at least flesh out the earlier sections a bit more. But I'm not going to even think about that until after I've finished the rest of the book.

I think I'm almost done with Chapter 12...maybe one or two more read throughs and I'll have it. This was the hardest chapter for me to edit. I struggled over each sentence, each action. It had to be perfect. I know that's dangerous. My editor...my friend, tells me that I can't let it be precious to me, I have to just write. But I can't. It is precious, no matter how many times I tell myself it's not.

Anyway, I'm going back to Chapter 12 now...wish me luck!