Two steps forward, one step back

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Writing has some similarities to a soft shoe shuffle. There I was, bombing along with the WIP, when the pace fell off, I went on my trip to the outback, and I came home and re-read what I'd written. Now, the basic drive of the story is fine. Olivia's parents are missing somewhere Out There. She wants to find them and eventually discovers they've chased after something they found in an old book. But it got a bit messy. Why would they have done this? Wouldn't they have done that? Is this plausible? And um no, it's not.

So now I have to flesh out the back story from the missing parent's point of view. What happened? Where did they go? What did they see? What were they afraid of? Who knew? Who wanted to know?

When I've worked all that out, the story will flow again. And I'll have to do extensive revisions of the chapters I've already written. Oh well.

I did a little bit of looking around on the stock sites and bought the picture on the post. He looks a little bit young, but in the future we'll all be like that, able to retain our youthful good looks well into advanced age. Pity I'll miss out. Most of my leading men aren't model handsome. But this one is. And he's rich, and an admiral. And a womaniser.

Which brings me to another issue. Just today I saw a link to an article which explained that bad boys are just assholes. It's well worth a read, talking about the romance tropes where love changes the bad boy. This led into discussions about Donald Trump (doesn't everything) and alphaholes. Please remember the article on alphaholes is not meant to be taken too seriously, and I certainly recognised at least one of my admirals in the description. I want to make the point that in my opinion alphaholes are not bad boys - or at least not necessarily. The people described in the article about bad boys are just that - nasty men who brutalize women, and probably everyone else, to get their way. And I'm not just talking about physical violence. That's not at all the same as a strong person (male or female) who is a leader. Leaders by definition are not always nice. They can't afford to be. Sometimes they have to sack people, or if they're military officers, give orders that get others killed. That's how it goes.

Admiral Jackson Prentiss is an alphahole - a leader who is very good at his job, who has found through experience that ladies flock to him, and fleet personnel want to work on his ships. He's not perfect and he will find that the lovely Professor Olivia Jhutta is more than his match in some matters. I was chatting with him a little while ago, about mistakes.

"Everybody makes mistakes," he said. (He's in hospital with a broken rib, the result of an accident caused by someone else) "I'll recover fully from this. Olivia will suffer for a short time from a bruised ego. The difference is if I, as Admiral Prentiss, make a mistake, it could lead to the loss of a ship and all its complement, or bombardment of a city, or some sort of accident costing thousands, if not millions, of lives. The trouble is that very often doing nothing is the same as making a mistake." And that fact is what I find so fascinating about high ranking military officers, and why I like to write about them.

Admiral Prentiss will make his debut some time this year. Life, as always, gets in the way. I see more hospitals  and more travel in my crystal ball, but the book (still just entitled 'WIP') will get done. Then you'll be able to judge for yourselves.