Suppose you are in opposition to the main characters.\u00a0 Of course, you don’t think of yourself as a villain; you think of them as annoyances in the way of your Grand Plan.\u00a0\u00a0 But consider someone who (as is not unknown in the construction industry) is both a tough, hardnosed boss running a big business…and also someone with some connections to the underworld.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now suppose that you have told an underling that someone has become too big a nuisance and stumbling block to be tolerated anymore, but nothing should be traceable back to the Family. You know what I mean.<\/p>\n
Now the underling has the bright idea of….let’s say…putting a plutonium pill into someone.\u00a0 That’s not it, of course, that would be a spoiler. And it doesn’t really matter what the bright idea consisted of, whether it was a Rube Goldberg kind of thing with trip wires and marbles running down chutes to release a heavy bottle of ancient Scotch onto the vic’s head,\u00a0 or letting a venomous snake into the house.\u00a0 What matters is that the plan doesn’t work, at least not in the sense of quickly<\/em> getting rid of X.\u00a0 And the method chosen could indeed be traced back, if anyone works hard enough on it.\u00a0\u00a0 You find out, of course, from your various spies, that the plan failed. How long do you wait before calling in the underling and chewing him out?<\/p>\n Originally,\u00a0 I had scenes relating to this confrontation set days after the intended vic was “merely” in intensive care but might live.\u00a0 But yesterday I thought, “No, Bossman isn’t going to wait that long.”\u00a0 And then I thought “But maybe…”\u00a0 I’m being tossed on the horns of that dilemma.\u00a0 I’ve moved one of the scenes forward but in the midst of readying the second one…I had second thuoghts.\u00a0 And third and fourth and fifth ones, too.\u00a0\u00a0 So…will he call in underling as soon as it’s clear X isn’t dead yet?\u00a0 Or will he wait to see what underling does?<\/p>\n No promises that I’ll use the answer y’all come up with, but I might.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Suppose you are in opposition to the main characters.\u00a0 Of course, you don’t think of yourself as a villain; you think of them as annoyances in the way of your Grand Plan.\u00a0\u00a0 But consider someone who (as is not unknown in the construction industry) is both a tough, hardnosed boss running a big business…and also Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,10],"tags":[39,7],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-into-the-fire","category-the-writing-life","tag-into-the-fire","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}