Got a line by line critique of my third scene from Beth today, and she was awesome as usual. She said something that may end up changing the way my book looks, which of course means lots more work, rewriting the thing yet again. I so want to be done with this book. I’m hungry for a new project. This one feels stale to me. Of course, I’m doing my best to make it as good as I can before sending it out there as my representative in the writing world.
But I can’t figure out if the sexual tension in my first chapter dilutes the goal of my protagonist. Beth made the valid point that this book started out as a 70,000 word Harlequin Temptation. Then I decided to revise it and it turned into a single title piece of fiction. It’s not a romance, there’s not that whole having the hero and heroine together on every page kind of thing.
But there’s a romance subplot that feeds and exists parallel to the main plot. Beth’s point was that this romance subplot, this sexual tension, seems to divide the protagonist’s attention in ways that are not quite believable. I see what she means, sort of. OTOH, in RL people can deal with more than one problem at a time, so why can’t a protagonist of a novel?
Still, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Clearly, it doesn’t work for Beth. But, I still have to decide if the parallel plot structure I’ve set up works for me as a reader or not. I want to take the “oh hell it will be a lot of work to rewrite this” part out of the equation and try to look at the opening scenes as a reader and see if I agree with Beth or not.
What that means is I have to have myself a sit down and read through those first chapters again. I have to pretend that my blood and tears are not on every page and that I’m simply a reader who picked this book up at the store. Does it work for me or not?
Needless to say, I’m quite apprehensive about the answer.