Having an apostrophe

Tonight I was pondering Prayers to Broken Stone, one of several unfinished novels that's in the running to be my next project. Prayers has had structural problems for a while; namely, I originally envisioned it as a braided narrative, with three characters having equal weight. Great. Except that one character had all the plot but a thin backstory, one had a well-fleshed backstory but no plot, and the third was mostly hanging around being the brooding love interest. But I was trying to give them equal time. Unsurprisingly, this wasn't working very well.

As I tried to hash this out with the boy, I kept coming back to a solution: Plot + Backstory = better character. I balked a little, because I like both characters. But years of liking has not grown me a solid book structure. So as soon as I'm done with the next pass of Kingdoms, I'll begin performing character surgery. It will be painful, but perhaps for the best.

Unless I have a better apostrophe before then.

Men without hats

Adjustment Bureau: Sweet and well-acted, with a nice understated SFnal twist. A little too heart-warming, maybe, or at least too easy, but I like the characters enough that I mostly don't care.

But. Comma. I am so fucking sick of romances wherein all the narrative weight is given to one character. By which of course I mean the male character. David was completely privileged by the narrative. David and Elise's lives didn't intersect; she got caught in his orbit. Damon and Blunt made me care about their characters equally, but the narrative didn't. And in a romance where both characters are supposed to be risking terrible sacrifice to be together, I damn well want to see both sides.

And speaking of characters and narrative weight, my decision yesterday to splice two characters in Prayers into one is having much greater effect than I imagined. The book is spinning in wildly different directions now--the brooding love interest who was supposed to be an equal third has fallen almost entirely by the wayside. Another character whose role hasn't changed has started taking on a whole new appearance and demeanor in my head. The plucky paleontologist love interest--one of the characters who got spliced--has grown back in a new body, with a new personality, and is now the female lead's love interest instead of the male's. This is all very alarming, but I'm curious to see how it will shake out.