When the Villain takes over.

Villains are inherently more interesting to write.

And because of that there is a constant temptation to turn them into good guys.

You see it all the time on TV shows. Some bad guy, who makes the show interesting, and over time they start becoming "nicer."  I heard this phenomenon often happens because the actor who plays the villain starts to agitate to make his/her character more "human" or "rounded" and thus the character loses what made the character fascinating in the first place.

That's probably so, but I also think any creator who has an interesting character wants to do the same thing.

So I try to resist.

Still, my new Golem, who's name is Mud (yes, his name is Mud) is the titular bad guy, has taken over my book. Which is good, in a way, because he is the title character, the wearer of The Last Sombrero. I think it's OK to make him a tragic character, one that the reader can sympathize with, but not make him good.

Last night I thought of the ending, which is one of the landmarks in any book, maybe the most important.

I don't know how the full book is going to play out.  About 15K words in I always realize that I need to add more elements, and I've begun that process.  I want to keep it as simple as possible.

The major bad guy left from The Last Fedora is still out there, but I intend to save him for the third book.

Thing is, I'm excited to wake up every morning to write. The book has me in it's grips. I stopped writing before dinner yesterday, as usual, but the ideas kept coming and finally I just sat down at midnight and wrote another chapter.

I need to remind myself whenever I'm in the doldrums of rewriting that this part of the process is so fulfilling and so much fun. Rewriting is totally necessary, and it makes the book better for the reader, but the first draft is so much more fun for the writer.