If you want me to leave, you can put your hands on my hot, tight little body and make me.

Spike ,'Get It Done'


The Great Write Way  

A place for Buffistas to discuss, beta and otherwise deal and dish on their non-fan fiction projects.


Susan W. - Sep 28, 2004 8:33:45 am PDT #6860 of 10001
Good Trouble and Righteous Fights

Hmm. I don't want Sebastian to actually be an incompetent rider or anything, but I'm also not sure I want to give him a straightforward good rider fall like I gave James in the first chapter by having Ghost get spooked (pun intended) and refuse a fence. Maybe there's a new horse who's a bit of a brute, and Sebastian thinks he can be the one to tame him and gets thrown in the process?


deborah grabien - Sep 28, 2004 8:39:11 am PDT #6861 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

Yes, exactly. Not incompetence: overreaching. That's where I was going with it.


Susan W. - Sep 28, 2004 8:50:12 am PDT #6862 of 10001
Good Trouble and Righteous Fights

And if he's afraid he's embarrassed himself in the eyes of his fellow officers, it'll make him all the more eager to court a superior officer's pretty, rich cousin. I like this.


erikaj - Sep 28, 2004 9:00:28 am PDT #6863 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

How do you decide who to kill?(Because, ok, it's noir. Somebody's ticket's getting punched. ) But I can't decide if it should be Mysterious Rich Hottie Client's Sister or if someone should die in the quest to protect MRHCS and she's in more of a "Can they save her before it's too late?" kind of deal. Most of my fiction doesn't go in for killing...except with sharp words.


deborah grabien - Sep 28, 2004 9:12:03 am PDT #6864 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

erika, it depends. How annoying is the sister, how vital is she to the continued happiness of the hottie brother?


Susan W. - Sep 28, 2004 9:19:55 am PDT #6865 of 10001
Good Trouble and Righteous Fights

Hmm. In my work I mostly kill people just to streamline the plot and get them out of the way (and, boy, is it easy to do in the late 18th and early 19th centuries--French bullets and consumption and childbed fever, oh my!). But I think you want to go for the most important person dying that you can make the rest of the story work without. IOW, kill the sister if you can, IMO.


erikaj - Sep 28, 2004 11:25:42 am PDT #6866 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

I could, defintely...there are still many ways to take a person out in this century.


Susan W. - Sep 28, 2004 11:27:41 am PDT #6867 of 10001
Good Trouble and Righteous Fights

Yep. The beauty of the past for a death-minded writer is it's just so easy to kill people young without necessarily resorting to violence.


erikaj - Sep 28, 2004 11:36:43 am PDT #6868 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

No shit. If I ended up choosing death for the sister, it'd be a blunt-force trauma, as she's survived a difficult birth and a car accident that killed her husband already, and, to quote a perp on Homicide who tried to hit the same woman twice "the bitch just won't die."


Anne W. - Sep 28, 2004 1:44:35 pm PDT #6869 of 10001
The lost sheep grow teeth, forsake their lambs, and lie with the lions.

How do you decide who to kill?

Basically, what Susan said. Whose death will hurt the most (the characters and the reader) without deep-sixing the plot?