Try for emotion.

Emotion is hard to write.  Oh, it's easy enough to talk about it. To put in all the words that are supposed to signify emotion, but unless the reader feels it, it's just sentiment.

I set out to write Gargoyle Dreams as a pure love story, a sort of Hunchback of Notre Dame kind of tale, but as it evolved it became more of an adventure story -- as I am prone to write.  Nothing really wrong with that, and I still like the book. Linda did actually tear up as I read the last chapter, so I must have succeeded at some level.

Still, to write about Love for an entire book is a hard thing to do.

Maybe I shouldn't even try. Maybe the emotion is a byproduct of the story.

But it is my intention to try harder to have real emotions in my stories.  To have characters who feel real enough for people to care about.

To my great surprise, I'm writing a second Golem book.  The first three chapters came spilling out of me. But this morning, I needed to decide on where to go from here.

I came up with a plot turn, but...well, it seemed kind of standard,  somehow. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing that great about it either.

Instead I asked myself, whose personality needs to be expressed?  Which character do I need to go into the head of?

So the fourth chapter is going in a different direction than I thought. I'm going into Jacob the Good Golem's head. He's become human, or has he?

There is a lot to milk there -- philosophically and emotionally.  The Frankenstein story of what makes a human.

I'm hoping I can keep making these decisions about the plot that feel true and surprising.