I’m nearly halfway through the first draft of Love Struck, book two in the Pinkerton Falls: Pink Matchmakers series.
Which means I’ve entered the dangerous middle.
This is the part where I desperately want to go back and start polishing. Tighten dialogue. Layer in emotional nuance. Add texture. Fix that one line on page 37 that has been bothering me for three days.
But the story isn’t finished yet.
And first drafts are not for tinkering.
They’re for momentum.
Yes, I have an outline. And—shockingly—I’m following it fairly closely this time. That doesn’t always happen. There are books where I plot carefully, feel very pleased with myself… and then the characters hijack the wheel and drive straight off my carefully constructed narrative road.
When that happens, I chase them.
Usually, they win.
Occasionally, I wrestle the story back, cut the rogue chapters, tuck them into an “ideas” file, and realign with the original blueprint.
Characters will do almost anything.
They just insist on doing it their way.
The Pivot Problem
This morning I hit a wall.
I knew where the story needed to go—Plot Point A to Plot Point B—but neither my hero nor heroine could logically make the pivot. They didn’t have the information. They didn’t have the leverage. They didn’t even have the right suspicions.
So I did what I love doing in a series:
I brought in another POV.
A secondary character who does know what’s happening behind the curtain. Someone who can quietly nudge the dominoes.
The best part? That minor character will eventually get their own book.
So this is where I start planting seeds. Establishing voice. Hinting at backstory. Dropping subtle clues into my series notes for future me to harvest later.
I love woven stories. Characters drifting in and out of each other’s lives. Easter eggs. Threads that don’t pay off until two books later. It makes the world feel alive instead of staged.
That intentional layering? That’s one of my favorite parts of writing series fiction.
The Temptation to Overexplain
The hardest discipline is restraint.
When you meet a new character, it’s tempting to spill everything—what they fear, what they love, their childhood wounds, their favorite breakfast cereal.
But that’s not storytelling. That’s a résumé.
If you want to know who someone is, watch what they do.
Plot reveals character. Pressure reveals truth.
Which brings me to…
The Hard Parts
Everyone assumes the hardest scenes to write are the sex scenes.
They’re not.
Those are emotional choreography. Intimacy is about vulnerability, pacing, consent, tension. They require care—but they flow.
Physical fights?
That’s where I sweat.
Fight choreography has to be clear, spatially coherent, emotionally grounded, and fast. In my head, it runs like a movie. On the page? Sometimes it turns into a blur of limbs and impact.
My proofreaders are very good at circling those moments and writing, politely:
Who is where?
When I reread those flagged passages, I see exactly what they mean. So I slow down. I translate the movie more carefully. I anchor the action in bodies and space.
Writing is humbling like that.
But for now?
No polishing.
No overthinking.
No tinkering.
Just forward motion.
Because the dangerous middle only becomes the satisfying ending if you keep going.
And I fully intend to keep going.
Lily Writes 
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