Well, I think its more of a greens, but it doesn't sound that interesting. But, I'm hitting that stride in the middle of a novel where you start to doubt yourself. Going back through chapters, wondering if you added too much or didn't add enough. I've been reading some really interesting things about writing novels, some of them I think I'm going to steal. Though, hopefully OpenOffice.org will have new meta tools to let me do it automatically; I like being able to parse my novel and get information about it.

It's also strange writing a story as a serial. You have comments which definitely change how you write things. One of those things that is changing is the next four chapters.

I will admit, Paksenarrion is one of my major influences in writing. I mentioned it before, but I find that some of the common themes that really resonate with me and they also show up in my own writing. One of them is a scene near the end of the book, when Paks is being tortured in the thief guild. I'm in a scene like that with DL. It's important for the character development, leads to a bunch of other stuff, and sets up most of the rest of the book. However, there is that question of how much detail do you go into. In Paksenarrion, the detail level would squick Fluffy but it doesn't bother me. In DL, I'm trying to find the right balance of detail verses glossing it over for a very similar scene.

And the problem. My commentors. The people who send me fan art (*squee*) and have entire conversations on the motivations of my characters. Most of them would greatly like to see more detail in this scene. They want to see the main character beaten down, really beaten down, because they know he is going to rise above it.

So, what do you do? Do you break your character, show the lowest they can go, or do you gloss over it? Do you give the people who respond to your story what they want, knowing that you'll lose some of your readers, or do you keep it more "fluffy" so it appeals to more people?