Neutering the Bad Boy

It’s funny the things you find out about your characters that you don’t realise until you’ve written The End. Have done the HEA for the Hammer Pants ms (actually they’re Hammer Capris since I’ve come up short on the word count) and figured I’ve been pulling back on my hero. I wanted him to be a bad boy – hey he knows it and has been trying to tell me so it’s not his fault – but actually, he’s not all that bad. In my efforts to make him sympathetic, I’ve neutered the poor man. Which kind of defeats the purpose of his conflict and may be one of the reasons I was struggling with the ms. Never a good thing to do with an alpha. So one of the many pieces of tailoring I have to do to the Hammer Pants to get them looking like Chanel is to give my poor bad boy back his cojones. He’s not a happy lad, let me tell you, and he did not appreciate my efforts to contain him.

Such are the joys of the alpha male.

Anyway to give myself a bit of alpha practice, I’ve been redoing my Frenchman to suit Presents/Modern. Yes, it’s quite different to writing MH but to be honest, I’m quite enjoying releasing my inner emo. As you know, I LOVE teh angst. Bring on the drama, the torture, the sexy darkness! You can’t go too dark with MH – at least not as dark as I want – so letting it all hang out with a bit of Presents is actually quite liberating. Anyway, I always had a sneaking suspicion that the Frenchman erred on the Modern side of the Modern Heat line so it’s not been too much work to pull him completely over it. And I have to say, he’s happier as a Modern hero. His voice in my head wasn’t ever MH and so the rest of the ms is not all that MH is tone either. In fact I’m secretly thinking of sending the first chapter to SYTYCW, just to see what happens. Hehe.

So what’s everyone else doing? Neutered any bad boys lately?

15 thoughts on “Neutering the Bad Boy”

  4. Ye Gads!
    For a moment there I thought Hoo was about to get his nadgers cut off!

    I haven’t got far enough into my current wip to neuter the hero yet, but hey, the night is young! Will keep your warning in mind and try to give him some rope…

    Good Luck with the sub. xx

  6. Jo – poor Hoo! No, I couldn’t do that to the poor little octopus. He wouldn’t let me near ’em anyway. 🙂 Yep, pay out the rope ’cause let’s face it, there’s nothing as sexy as a bad boy. 😉 Cheers re the sub.

  7. Jackie, *raises hand* I have. I neutered my Frenchman. I will admit, I was afraid to take him where I was supposed to. I held back. And you’re right…what’s the point then?

    With renewed vigor, I will press on…and I will give the man his balls back.

  8. Maisey – lol! Just to say that I actually wrote this post BEFORE I heard re your revisions so you’re not alone. 🙂 Okay, so, we can do this right? Bring on the b*stards. 🙂

  9. Coo, snip, snip Jackie. Be gentle with the guy but go go go! Ooo I am liking the sound of the Frenchie. It’s good to dabble and have fun with things. Amazing what a pair of hammer pants can do eh!

  10. I love to write alphas, but you really do need to let them be who they are. It is a bit of a balance to ensure you don’t go too far. He does have to be redeemable, regardless of how very bad he’s been :).

  11. Judy – dabbling is right! Though whether it works out is a whole other story… 🙂

    Kaily – oh sure. And when I say my bad boy is bad, he’s not completely beyond the pale. He still has heroic qualities.

  14. Testicular reimplantation, eh? Sounds like you’ll need a pair of those superdeedooper micro-vascular surgery glasses.

    I don’t have any, but you can borrow my reading glasses if you want.

    Good luck with the procedure!

    Amy

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