X is reckless

Even when you’ve written the first draft of a book, the second draft can throw up its fair shares of surprises. In my case, and in the case of The Secret of Mhorrer, the surprise is a character I’ll just call “X” for the sake of argument. He’s not the main character, but still a major one that I thought might go beyond this book. Yet this character has become reckless in the second draft – reckless and belligerent. I’m not saying he was a pussycat before, but now he’s really become a hostile, and quite ready for a bit of torture and blood letting to the point that it is quite possible his end is a fatal one by the close of The Secret of Mhorrer.

And that wasn’t in the script.

I quite like X, to be honest. He added a brutal low-brow perspective on a war that is hardly grounded, dealing with vampires, demons and other terrible creations. But now this character suffers a transformation midway through the book. It happens during a plot-change in a middle chapter - that I swung in on a whim because it was a natural end to quite a violent episode.
Unfortunately X gets in the way and his character has suffered psychologically because of it.

So I have choice… I can go back and remove X from the firing line, keeping him unscathed physically and mentally, or I keep going down that dark path to a conclusion that would not be unexpected to me and fatal to X.
I’m tempted more towards the latter. The book needs to feel natural, and just because I like the guy, doesn’t mean I should spare him. I used that approach with one such supporting character in The Secret War, and while a close friend lamented his passing to me - thinking I should have kept him alive - he could see why he was killed off.

But I wonder if he’ll feel the same way about X?

And I wonder if I will too at the end of the second draft?

We authors can be fickle, you know…