My characters in The Bride Price (the book I plotted out before writing it) have rebelled and are changing the course of the story.   

First of all, this isn’t just something that comes with plotting.  Pansters go through this, too.  So I’m not saying that this is something negative in plotting.  What I am saying, though, is that characters definitely have a mind of their own.

In The Bride Price, Sep (the hero) decided he didn’t want to wait until the end of the story to confess his love for Angela, which was one of my main plot points to end the book.  So that particular ending is now tossed out.

Then Sep decided he wasn’t going to as weak or reckless as I wanted him to be.  Sep, if you’ll recall in Shotgun Groom, went through a lot of abuse early in life (11-14), and Joel Larson had his work cut out for him in helping Sep heal from all of that.  Well, if I went with what I had plotted out, then all that work Joel did would have been for nothing.  (Something neither Joel nor Sep are all that thrilled about.)  So that changes the second half of the entire book.  Sep wants to prove that he can calmly and rationally handle the conflict that has now been brought to his attention.  I would say what, but that would spoil the book.

Then Angela (the heroine) has also decided she’s not going to follow the things I plotted out.  First, she decided she wasn’t going to have a limp.  In the beginning, she was supposed to have scars and a limp, but she didn’t want the limp so I had to toss that out.  Now, she’s decided she doesn’t want to be clueless that something is bothering Sep.  (This goes into the conflict I was talking about above.)  Right away, she knew something was wrong, and she’s decided she’s going to spy on him until she finds out what it is.  This also changes the entire course of the story.

The villains are also not fully cooperating with me.  I’m not sure what’s going on there, either.

So I’m throwing out the rest of the outline I had made, and I’m going to wing it the rest of the way through.  Honestly, I’m surprised my attempt at plotting lasted halfway into the story, so I wouldn’t call my experiment a failure.  It wasn’t.  I could go back and plot out things again, but I would rather spend that time writing the book.  I would like to have this one all finished and off to my editing team by the time school starts.

When it comes to writing, authors are not the ones in charge.  The characters are.  But that is why writing is so much fun.  It’s neat to see how the characters develop over the course of the story.

Her Counterfeit Husband is getting a facelift.

One of my friends/beta readers pointed out something that had slipped my mind.  Candace (Lady Hedwrett) is the heroine in If It Takes A Scandal (Marriage by Bargain Series: Book 4), and if you’ll recall, I introduced her in Her Counterfeit Husband.  The main characters in Her Counterfeit Husband are Anna and Jason (the Duke and Duchess of Watkins), and since they are Candace’s friends, I brought them back for If It Takes A Scandal.  For those who read If It Takes A Scandal and like it, they might want to go back and read Her Counterfeit Husband.  So I thought I’d get a new cover.

Here’s the old one:

Here’s the new one:

The cover was made by Love, Lust and Lipstick Stains, and I found them at The Book Cover Designer website that features pre-made covers.  The link I posted will take you to the other covers Love, Lust and Lipstick Stains have made, but you can look through other covers by other artists and in a variety of genres on the website.  I was really pleased by the look of the cover I selected.  Once you buy the pre-made cover, they take it off sale.

I am also going to give the description a facelift, too.  For that, I am hiring Best Page Forward to redo that for me.  I can write a novel, but it’s hard to describe it.  I started using this service for The Bride Price and was so happy with it that I’m letting Best Page Forward do other descriptions for me.  Since I’m giving Her Counterfeit Husband a new cover, I decided to give it a new description, too.  I haven’t gotten that yet, but I’ll post that when I publish If It Takes A Scandal so that you can read both of them together if you want.