Here's the thing: I've just finished Draft 4 revisions at this point and I'm waiting for the dust to settle before I pick it back up for line edits (always do this, by the way. No matter how much you urgently want to get your work into the world, giving yourself some distance is essential to accurately assessing what you've written).
When this happened on Draft 2, I decided to immediately begin writing the sequel, full to bursting with ideas. I got about 30,000 words into the sequel before my beloved beta reader pointed out one of the major flaws in Book 1 (the runes thing), and I immediately knew that another global revision of Book 1 was in order. So, I abandoned the sequel to complete Draft 3 of Book 1, which I erroneously believed was my final draft. Then, I set about querying, heeding absolutely none of my own advice about line edits, by the way.
Then, during my summer of queries, I set about revising the part of Book 2 that I'd already written, knowing that most of it hinged upon parts of Book 1 that had summarily changed. I completed my first draft of Book 2 in August and decided to let the dust settle on that, shoving it in the metaphorical drawer to rest. And then, my final beta reader returned her comments, and a slew of rejections came my way. I knew then what should have been obvious all along: I had another global revision to go.
And it has taken me until this latest (and hopefully final) revision to finally feel that my love interests are fleshed out. I hope that, if you are a writer, you've put more time and care into your love interests than I did mine, because this whole situation might have been avoided had I planned my characters better. Or maybe not.
The process of arriving at Saoirse as the primary love interest and Arawn as the guy who's interested in Ais and whom Ais might be interested in, had Saoirse not existed, is what I might call organic. Which is to say, a whole hot mess. Because it turns out that it's hard to write a sapphic relationship on the page when love triangles are still overwhelmingly heterosexual. The road map for creating complex female love interests was...still practically nonexistent. And, despite all my best efforts, Ais's first love interest was turning into a manic pixie dream girl right before my eyes.
But let me back this up a bit.
Before there was Saoirse, there was Llyweyla, or Lu for short. Lu was a healer, a beautiful girl who falls for Ais almost as soon as Ais arrives at the home of the resistance. There is no buildup, only insta-love. Lu had no personality, and her ambitions were largely defined by what Ais wanted. There was some cringe-worthy spice in there. There was an excessive amount of kissing. And because Lu was so bland, it felt more like a self-insert authorial fantasy. And it was around the time I began making live edits, while my beta readers were reading, that I realized I didn't want my betas to read this. It was like bad fanfiction. It was awful and embarrassing.
So, I course-corrected. It was around that time that I realized another character had way more personality and enemies-to-lovers chemistry with Ais: Lu's sister, Saoirse. Saoirse was angry and bitter, foul-mouthed and quick with a sword, but with a wounded soul beneath all that. Where Lu had been shielded from the espionage training that her awful great-uncle/old resistance general had put her through, Saoirse had borne the brunt of it in the wake of their brother's death. Saoirse was a victim, but she was also a survivor. And I realized that I wanted Ais and Saoirse together more than anything.
So I made Ais have a crush on Lu (whom I had renamed Enya by this time), but had Lu reject her. When she goes to defeat Arawn and steal back Murias, cauldron of plenty, Ais gets paired with Saoirse and realizes they're much better suited anyway. But, problem! Saoirse was becoming bland now. It seemed that the act of assigning someone as a love interest automatically made them one-dimensional, a problem I'd also had with Arawn in prior drafts. Instead of having stabby Saoirse in the action, being with Ais turns Ais into the hero...and sidelines a character who would never stand for that. Same with Arawn. Having Ais around turns him into a lovesick fool who capitulates to anything she says...even giving up his throne willingly. That's not right.
So in this most recent edit, I decided something: even though the story is told from first-person, I would write a chapter in the perspective of each of the love interests to gain a thorough understanding of them. And what I learned was that Saoirse is like a wounded animal: she wants to be treated with gentleness, but her first instinct is to lash out, because that's what she learned. I got rid of the character of Enya and combined parts of her (working in the infirmary) with Saoirse, thus creating a palpable motive for Saoirse; she resents everyone because the one job she loves is no longer available to her now that her brother is dead, and this goddess is slowly overtaking everything she loves. The tension arises from many things, but mainly because both Ais and Saoirse are prickly, wounded people. Getting them together is a process of mutual healing...which means crafting scenes that place them both in vulnerable and heroic positions.
In terms of Arawn, I wanted him to be an isolated young man, who naturally falls for Ais because she's the first goddess he's ever met who shares even close to the skillset he does. He feels that Ais understands his pain, and Ais eventually learns to turn this into a strength. But he's not foolish anymore. I gave him back an edge of casual cruelty: he still doesn't love the fae, and he's certainly not giving up his throne for Ais. This involved redrafting the ending numerous times, though the basic plot points have not changed. But that is another story for another day.
Anyway-- happy drafting :)
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