Release Day! Those Pesky Head-Strong Characters

Release day. This is my favourite day. I’m blogging at a bunch of places today and having contests to celebrate, and you can check out the list here.

When I started writing this book, I wondered how to deal with the angel thing. Amelia was the first character to come to me. I was kind of expecting to write this beautiful, ethereal, softly glowing character, an angel pure as snow, gentle and gracious like the angels I’ve read about. But she was bad-ass right from the beginning and I wasn’t quite sure why, until I realized that she had absolutely no emotion. She felt nothing. On purpose. She gave it all away to protect her race, and now she works for the Archangels, hunting down rogue angels and sticking the ones who won’t do what she says with her pretty sword.

The bitch. Could she have made my job any harder? How the hell I was going to write a romance with a heroine who couldn’t fall in love? Whose only purpose in life was to do the Archangels’ bidding? And whose actions made her pretty unlikeable? I mean, even I wasn’t liking her and that’s not a good thing.

Then it was like a bell went off in my head. ding ding ding Challenge!

Of course, Amelia does reclaim her emotions and is able to fall in love. It gets complicated because of their circumstances, but especially because of her fear. As I was writing, I couldn’t get over the fact that Amelia didn’t want her emotions. She was fighting me (and Gabriel) tooth and nail, to get rid of them again and I finally realized it was because she was afraid.

But who isn’t afraid of falling in love, knowing that everything could backfire and you might be left in worse shape than when you started? Fear will do a lot of things, including make you second guess yourself, and Amelia does a lot of that. Angel or not, she’s vulnerable. She has weaknesses. And I think that’s what finally clicked with me and makes her one of my favourite characters ever.