Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

Ah, inspiration. I have the villains of the piece. Poisonous people, literally. Using a world as their chessboard, and abducting people from other worlds to push about it as their chesspieces, having murdered a lot of people to clear the way, and slandered the survivors.

Now, oh villains of the piece, come out on stage. Show our heroine what you can do. Give her a reason to run away from the people you are deceiving. Make her think on how she has to help protect some innocents. I know that she rejects you all in the end, but give her a reason before you tell her that you have to use this world to protect your own.

The time has come. For the third and final attempt of the sorceress to catch our fleeing prince and princess, and their companions. It is only right and proper for this to be the conclusion.

Only, in fairy tales, it's a lot easier to just have it change the third time, without setting it up or dramatizing it.

I think my hero's going to have to put some extra work into this one.

Ah, the fun of being a writer.  Figuring out where to put the skulls, and scratching the idea of following the fairy tale.  If she, Baba Yaga like, put them on poles around her home, the hero and heroine would decide that collecting them would take too long.  Decent burial for the dead had to take a second place to the escape of the living.

Whereupon I realized that the hero would have been grimly unsurprised to see them on the poles, but shocked to stumble on them out of place.

The isekai where the trope is the heroine is inserted into a romance game as the villainess, facing disasters and often death at every turn because of the game heroine's path, is very popular. It's even overshadowed the original isekai subgenre where the heroine is inserted into a light novel as the villainess.

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When, oh when, do I have a villain strike? I ponder how I have been making time fly to give my hero time to finish growing up. I have to introduce his evil soon or it will look silly. . .

Aha! I can have him sulk in the forest, think about the need for secrecy, and then decide to lie low for a time. That will mean he doesn't jump out like a jack-in-a-box, and is showing his evil for a time.

Still going to introduce that attack soon. Hero's doing too well.

Certain characters are going to see our hero for the first time.

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You start with what you start.

But in some respects, if the muse puts forth a theme, it's the hardest thing to work with.

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Was once in a rip-roaring online discussion about whether superheroes should marry.  After all, they risk their lives so often.  Is it fair to marry with the awareness that you will quickly leave behind a widow?  What if there are children?  Should they be deprived of one parent?  It's not actually like police, who would not be expect to be in a shootout every month.

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If you want to have multiple villains (as I was talking about recently) , you need to orchestrate them.

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