The End Game

I was trying to sleep last night and I was stressing about what to do with the last of my character books, book 12.  (Book 13 is a finale book with all of the characters joining together or maybe it will be the beginning of something new.  Who knows?)  I have decided which characters will be introduced in each book, even if I don't know all there is to know about them yet.  I have a basic character structure for my main people and have an idea about how they will act.  Of course they tend to surprise me once I start writing for them.  Anyway, during my sleeplessness I came up with the plot for book 12.  This one has been driving me nuts since it's a difficult premise to deal with.  Happily I found my muse for the main character in this book and it took off from there. 

I had been toying with the idea of having a human bad guy for this one.  My heroine has faced off against monsters, vampires, werewolves and all the traditionally scary things of the paranormal, but she hasn't had to battle someone who was still human and completely evil. At least not as a main bad guy. So I came up with a basic plot, which of course will change once I start writing it, but at least something is down in print.  As I was thinking about the scenario and what the villain was like, I started to hated to truly hate my villain.  I think I hate him more than any other bad guy so far. 

It's easy to dismiss evil when it comes in the form of a creature that was either created to be evil or is synonymous with being bad.  Kill a vampire or a werewolf in their truest monstrous form and no one will cry for them.  Shoot a zombie and people start to cheer.  Kill a human villain, that's tricky.  You stop and think, can they be redeemed?  Will people cry for the human?

Have a person who is living and breathing makes you stop and decide how to handle him.  Do you keep him alive because killing people is wrong?  Do you have him go through the justice system and roll the dice?  Given that this isn't a criminal justice book, I doubt they will have to go through jury selection for this guy.  Yet it isn't so cut and dry.  You kill the monster without thought, unless you think there is some good in them.  Do you kill off the human who is doing more harm than some of the monsters you've faced?  Tough question.  That is something that I will have to decide once I write the end of the book. 

In the end, I'm just grateful to finally have a strong enough story that I think will provide enough for me to write about and enough for people to be interested in.  Hopefully I can sleep better tonight, though I still have to deal with Book 9 and 10 and 11, so we shall see.