In the midst of all the frantic work to write and put together my abnormal psych class the last 3 and a half weeks, I’ve been working as much as possible on the plotting front, and as I’ve already mentioned, Pot and I have been doing character interviews. Mostly I’ve focused on Marley and Conall, with a handful of questions addressed by Marley’s best friend Anya. One person I’ve seriously neglected is Knox, my bad guy. This is very odd for me because usually I love my villains and devote a lot of time to their backstory and psychology and figuring out what makes them tick. I said something to Pot today about not being able to answer some question she’d asked me about Knox and she said, “Kettle, what does a guy have to do to get your attention, strip the flesh from bound women?”
Um, yeah, actually…
See that’s the thing. Historically my villains are serial killers. Or at the very least psychologically screwed up individuals. I normally spend all this time on their M.O.’s, why they choose a particular type of victim, what the turning point was that tipped them to the Dark Side–all sorts of incredibly detailed forensic psych analysis. Because I’m a total geek about stuff like that.
But Knox isn’t a serial killer. He’s a power hungry werewolf with Machiavellian aspirations to win leadership of his pack. The farthest I’ve ever gone with him is figuring out why he arranged to have the prior alpha executed. I don’t know much else about him other than the fact that he hates Conall and isn’t going to react well to him entering the competition for alpha. Frankly, Knox just isn’t that interesting to me. I’m still in that swoony, get-to-know-you love stage with Conall and Marley (a phase which I often don’t have in my more traditional romantic suspense–hence my villain love), so I just haven’t spent the kind of time with Knox I’m going to need to make him an interesting character.
I think Pot is going to be interested to see how I pull that off given that he doesn’t have a history as an animal-abusing, bed-wetting firestarter.
Hahahaha. Yeah, I’m sick and twisted. That’s apparently what it takes to get my attention.
Flowers are good too…