This is not going well...

What do you do when you stop trusting your characters? I've finally realized that I'm looking at basically doing a full and complete rewrite of Carli's Kills, changing everything the characters initially set themselves up for, and I'm pissed as hell. It's like I'm beginning from scratch...and I've already done that, once.

I went the direction I thought they wanted. Set the structure and timing pretty much down. Had the characters interacting in ways I thought they wanted. Wasn't crazy about some of the maneuvering I had to do to make things work, but it was going forward.

And I do mean they led me along this particular path. But now it's suddenly, Oh let's just start over? Let's not have Carli all THAT much of a killer. Let's take away Zeke's pain and just have him really upset at what's happened to a buddy. Let's not have Carli so full of guilt or anger.

I don't know what the story is, anymore. It's fallen completely apart.

This is the second time I've had this happen. First Dair's Window went off in wild directions, to where it was becoming Adam's story instead of Dair's...and now CK is going all kumbaya on me. Like they want to all smoke a nice peace pipe at the end that's packed with pot.

I also had a script collapse on me, once. This action-suspense piece about a mobster who has a witness against him killed, but the witness expected it and took out a contract on the mobster's son. Just not the one everybody knew about. He'd gotten a woman pregnant and she had the kid and moved across the country. The dead man aimed the contract at him...and a complete innocent is now Marked For Death. I got to the halfway point then BAM! Hit a brick wall. No idea where to go after that. At all.

Shit...maybe I'm not really a writer, except in a very limited genre of gay eroticism where the writing doesn't really count. Because I do not know what to do, now. I honestly do not know what to do.