Step 54: Confess (Day 8)

Today in Final Fantasy XV news: I need to work on my aim when spellcasting.

Even Noctis is judging my poor hand-eye coordination.

Which is tangentially related to today's #authorconfession:

Day 8. How do you cope with killing your darlings?

To date, I have only killed off one character in any my WIPs, which is one more than my liking. The answer is: it was hard. I knew when I started that particular manuscript that the character was going to die, and had hoped that by accepting their fate early on, I'd be able to fortify my resolve to go through with it when the time came.

Spoilers: I waffled. A lot.

In the end, I did manage to pull the trigger (so to speak), but I experienced an odd period of mourning over the loss of a fictional character conceived entirely in my own head. Said character wasn't particularly likable, to be perfectly frank--they were always meant to be somewhat of an antagonist to the MC. An antithesis, if you will, of what the MC could have been had their life taken a different path.

But the character grew on me over the course of writing the book, and their untimely death was a direct result of the tragedies they sustained in life. In some ways their demise was preventable, and in other ways it wasn't; in the end, my hope is that the impact they left in their wake will keep them alive in the minds of readers and other characters alike.