One of the things you need to do when you write with a partner is divvy up the work, and here in the writing cave we often end up each adopting part of the cast. Kent does the POV scenes for his adoptees, and Jen likewise for the other characters. It’s nothing formalized, but we do like it because it helps each characters’ scenes feel more consistent as a set.

So. On our read-through of Son of Music Novel, we agreed that the scenes from one particular POV felt longwinded and over-explainy. And this character happened to be someone Kent had adopted. It was a good fit, because this character’s personality and intellect are similar in some respects to Kent’s, so he felt comfortable with the voice. Maybe a little too comfortable.

There’s no rule against having boorish characters, even boorish POV characters. The trick is to convey them while avoiding boorish writing. We now have to address some issues because this character brought out some of the worst in Kent.* Rather, because when that happened he let it contaminate the prose.

Will we send Kent back to fix the mess he made? Will we bench him and put Jen in for a fresh take on it? We don’t know. But having two of us means we have options.

*note that we are not actually accusing Kent of being longwinded and over-explainy