Imaginary people

The characters that inhabit my book are selfish.

On this rewrite, one gets a new love interest (but no explicit sex, na-na-na-na). A couple of others get hugely expanded parts. One stays about the same as to word count but becomes (gosh, I hope) much more interesting.

One bad guy becomes more baditudinous (my blog, my grammar – get over it) and yes, I do believe some people are simply irredeemable. Another becomes more forgivable or at least, we can better understand how he got to be who he is.

Each and all of their stories and sub-plots are improved, or so I believe.

The thing is, while each of them is probably happy with her/his enhanced position in the story, none of them seem to give a thought to how much work I’ve had to do to give them what they needed.

I took out several scenes and others I scaled back - I want to say sharpened but we’ll see what the readers think. One major story arc is gone completely. Lots of my many months of hard work hit the cutting room floor. Okay, so it’s the archive file in my computer but same concept.

All this sweat and tears by yours truly and do you think the characters appreciate my labors? Not on your tintype!

I think I’m beginning to hate imaginary people.