She's habitually paradoxical.

Last night I had an epiphany about where I wanted to end the Descantverse saga.

You see, before City of Woe existed, the stories were just... The stories of three people in the same 'verse, which is all well and good, but part of the reason I was so quick to jump on the idea of a trilogy like CoW was because it offered the chance to tie them all together, and then I came up with a plotline for CoW that was simultaneously EVIL and just brings everything back around.

And, hell, I love stories that end where they began.

Last night, I sort of... Figured out how the story was really ending. I know the very last line of the entire series, even if everything else changes, that line will be the last line.

And I'm being so cryptic, but it's EXCITING to know where something is going to end. It makes me sad that I have to trawl through nine other books before I can get to the last trilogy, but... It's nice to know that I have a trilogy that deals exclusively with the mythology of the 'verse and ties everything together and then ends everything in a way that makes me FLAIL.

HEY, LOOK. I'M USING THIS JOURNAL.

Ages ago, I swore to God that after I'd went through hell with how the main villain of Lights kept changing every time I replotted the story, I would stick with the version I finally came up with.

I... Lied.

The thing is, I got stuck on a section of the story, so I started writing a huge part of the climax and as I was writing the big reveal of the main villain, I realized that it... Wasn't that good of a reveal. I mean, Dawson was always meant to be the villain, but she's SET UP as the villain from, like, the second chapter, and in the rewrite, I could fix it, make it more ambiguous, but that's not NEARLY as good as setting Dawson up to be the villain from the start, making the audience meeble over whether she is or not, and then have the villain be someone completely random.

So I went down a list of characters in this draft that could feasibly be Lilith (the true identity of the main villain) and came up with a character who would be PERFECT, because it would hurt more. Des never liked Dawson, so the emotional impact is kind of... Lacking. Granted, the emotional impact of the scene as it stands is playing out the same way it would have if Dawson were the villain, but that's because I'm writing it out of context and... I kind of wrote the new villain in right in the middle of writing it. The rewrite should be more of a gutpunch.

...I hope.

I really want to be done with this first draft. It sucks so much, but I'm sure once I figure out what I need to do to make the mystery an actual mystery with real suspects and some real stakes and shit, it will be... Better. God, I wish I didn't suck at this kind of thing. I need big, scary books.

And there's my babbling. I don't use this journal enough.