Things left undone

I usually hate unfinished projects. Whether it's reading a book I'm not enjoying, a sewing project I've lost interest in, or a dance choreography without a deadline, I generally try to push through because you never know what gem you'll find at the end. (I mean, was it just me or the first time through, did the beginning of Outlander seem to drag a little?)

So I'm a little disgruntled that I have a half-finished manuscript that I walked away from several years ago. I liked both main characters, but about the middle of the plot, I discovered that the hero was a bit of a prig and the heroine was way too passive. Don't get me wrong, they were completely correct for their time period, but as a modern reader/writer, I didn't want my hero to judge his love interest based on religious strictures and I didn't like that my heroine was allowing herself to be pulled into sixteenth-century politics without at least voicing some opposition.

Normally I would have done a hard print (for some reason I cannot edit on a computer screen) and enlisted some hard-core re-writes. But these characters overwhelmed me. I didn't see how I could reform their personalities without reforming them. So I hit "Save" and stashed them in my generic writing folder on my desktop.

For some reason, lately I've been thinking about them... I think it was when Aunt Constance (see earlier blog post) took over in my current work that I was reminded of their intractable nature.  Aunt Constance has proven to be useful in deepening the plot in which she was before only cursorily involved. And, she's been remarkably tractable ever since she established her dominance, if you will. Perhaps my Elizabethan characters will be willing to renegotiate how they come across to modern sensibilities