The amount of respect Roffil deserves: a little more than zero, but is given more to keep him in line

He's been maturing, he's doing better. ...Princess almost went into a full list of his faults, but it started to get really long and then she'd have to explain Powdered Dragon Scale to Janice and others, and it was basically getting sidetracked with no real benefit. The dangers of writing late at night, it can be easy to let characters go off on tangents. ^_^;;

...He's not great, though. He still harbors some jealousy towards Tola, especially now that he knows he's got a Super Special Talking Dragon. I didn't mean to let that out so early, but I couldn't realistically have Princess keep quiet in the middle of a major emergency. So he gets to know and she just has to deal with the consequences. I thought about having Roffil not notice, but he realized it after the fact when he went over what happened in his mind. Stopping that would've meant dumbing him down too much. Don't you just hate it when your characters aren't being convenient?

Yes, it's such a pain that the characters you made and contol completely aren't being cooperative~ Although I do hope he can get better by the end of book 3

Honestly? You'd be amazed at how little control I seem to have at times! There have been times where they surprise me, like around chapter 10 where Princess has a breakdown. Tola said something like "That's an 'animal' way of looking at things." And Princess just lost it. Couldn't do anything about it, my reaction was "Welp, guess we're doing this now!" There've also been lots of times where characters will have a conversation, and I'll have to go "No, I don't want that to happen yet" and delete half a page or more of text and start over. Only for it to happen again. They'll lose their temper and blurt something out, or they'll go off on tangents, or they'll come away with the wrong conclusion, and I have to retry the conversation and nudge things into different wording to change their reactions.

It took so many attempts in chapter 20 to get Princess to stop demanding Cheryl euthanize her and destroy the body. She kept coming to the decision that since she couldn't be with Tola, couldn't stay hidden on Earth indefinitely, and couldn't go back to Terra, it was the only way to preserve the secret of magic existing and allow Tola to have the "normal Earth life" she thought he wanted. But that was just too dark, and meant derailing everything to deal with the depths of her depression, and just getting in the way of her being comforted by Tola like she needed. ^.^;;

I basically write by "setting up a scene" and "letting it play out as it will", just kind of documenting what happens. I can nudge, but it doesn't always work well. (Lydia's entire alien obsession was fully the result of her own stubbornness, I had zero plans for it.) Combat is a lot harder to write specifically because I have to pick out moves and attacks and responses on all sides instead of it "flowing naturally" like conversations do. ^.^;;

Any updates

Unfortunately, during my last writing session on Wednesday, I had to discard most of the in-progress chapter because I need to rework the outline, so things got delayed further. I got halfway through the chapter and realized there was no way the characters would act the way I needed them to act. >.<

I might try to write a Vayryn chapter while I organize things, I might still write Princess next, it's hard to say. Health problems are still standing in the way of being able to write, the time and energy I have available are low. ~.~