Bodine's Bounty -- Back to writing!

I've been posting about fun stuff lately, not that writing isn't the most fun of all, but now it's time to talk about the "craft".

I'm 2/3 into my bounty hunter story and working hard to make my hero a dynamite Alpha man, but I can't help putting in some humor. The characters just scream out at me. "Let me say this ... oh please ... then I'll go back to my cool aloof facade."

So, though I'm tempted, I've been using humor only sporatically in this story. Bodine is really a hard man, hurt by life mostly. He's different than many of the other male heroes I've written, because he hadn't been betrayed by a woman. So for me, it's intriguing to write about a man who'd been close to only one other person in his life, his twin brother. And when that brother is mistaken for him and killed, Bodine finds and holds onto that hard edge, driven by guilt and revenge.

Enter my heroine - a spirited, runaway heiress that Bodine has been hired to protect. His job is to keep her safe - "unharmed and untouched" and Emma Marie Rourke truly makes him earn his money. She's out to find her outlaw father and live her dream of becoming a renowned entertainer. Emma sings like an angel, and when she lifts her voice in song, she touches Bodine in places no other ever has.

As my story progresses, I realize that I will write a sequel and the challenge for me is deciding how to shape and mold a secondary character to become my hero or heroine in the next story. But amazingly, these characters seem to jump out on the page, out of the blue. So now, I have Bodine's brother's widow to contend with and I've just learned that my villain has a sister. (Funny how that happens). So crafting a viable pre-conflict in this story for one of those ladies, will take some thought and ingenuity.

That's what I love about writing. It's never dull. There's always a challenge and best of all, when it's not working, there's always the delete key.