Now that Steph and I have a break in Sydney Croft projects, I'm back to work on the first Demon E.R. novel. < –happy demon

I love this story, though I admit that it's been hard getting back into it, mainly because I enjoy writing the Sydney novels so much, and I'm finding that writing w/out a partner is sort of…lonely.

I've also been dealing with another problem, mainly that my characters hate me.

See, I started this book off with a good foundation — I had my characters, my setting, and a good portion of the plot. I then got the framework up and filled it in — the first few chapters, which worked really well. But then…I started building more levels, and at this point, I put up the framework but didn't fill it in. So now I'm on page 176, and everything above the solid base at the end of chapter 3 is starting to collapse in on itself, no longer stable. I can no longer build. My characters are just staring at me, like, what the hell?

My hero, Eidolon, is eyeing the heroine, Tayla, arms crossed over his chest, saying, "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say to her. But I'll do her, because hey, I'm a male. A male succubus. Sex is sort of my job. Besides, she's hot."

Tayla shoots him the finger and glares at me. "Yeah, I'll sleep with him. I mean, have you seen him? Those muscles, those abs, those hands (this is the first I've heard of her hand fetish, btw.) But when we're done, I want to kill him, k?"

And of course, he's not happy about the killing thing, so he thinks he'll kill her first. AFTER the sex.

Grr.

At this point, killing each other is NOT in the plan. They should be FEELING something for each other. Something other than lust, anyway.

So now I've stopped forward motion on the story and have gone back to the beginning to start filling in the holes and reinforce the structure.
Sigh. I do this with EVERY book. You'd think I'd learn. Instead, I write quickly, mapping out the action and plot, but I always neglect emotion and character development in my haste to get the PLOT written. Inevitably, the structure grows weaker and weaker, until I hit a point where I can't build more because my characters have no idea how they feel about each other or themselves. They are going through the motion to do what the plot requires them to do, but they aren't FEELING it.

I know we all work differently, and honestly, I don't know if I can actually write the way I'd like to. This is what I always do, and it always turns out…but I feel like I'm doing it the hard way. I always blast my way for the first half, all excited about my word count…but I make up for it when I grind to a painful halt and have to spend days or weeks stuck at the halfway mark in order to go back and flesh out my characters' emotions and motivations.

What about you? Do you build your novel carefully, filling in the gaps and strengthening the structure as you go, or do you blow through it and then go back to shore up the weak spots before the whole thing collapses?