Facing the final boss

You can tell by the title that I’ve been reading too much manga lately. I’ve also been writing a book where the protagonists are facing the same adversary they’ve faced once before, and it’s meant to be the battle that ends the series. They almost lost the previous time, and now the stakes are higher.

In Saved by the Spell, House of Magic 2, Phoebe, Kane and their mage, vampire and werewolf friends faced a dark mage, Julius Blackhart. His goal was simple: he wanted to take over London and a powerful spell protecting it. For nefarious purposes, naturally. He was defeated, but only barely.

Now he’s back in book 5, and, naturally, he has to be more difficult to defeat than before to keep the readers’ interest. He’s become a warlock and has more powerful allies too—as far as warlocks are willing to have allies.

But having the good guys face the same bad guy, even if more powerful, and likely fight the same battle too, is boring. I tried to find ways to make the antagonist more interesting, and raise the stakes for the good guys. Nothing helped. Until I came to ask, what if Blackhart isn’t the final boss.

The readers of this blog know I’ve struggled with House of Magic 5 since January. It’s the end of February and the book hasn’t progressed at all. The only explanation I eventually came up with was that Blackhart and his goals weren’t interesting enough for me. So they probably wouldn’t interest my readers either.

However, once I came up with the idea that Blackhart isn’t the final boss Phoebe and Kane are facing, the story started to develop in a whole new way. The big question of course is, who is worse than a warlock in this urban fantasy world, and what does he/she want.

I’m not giving the answer here, but it does take the story out of London. It might take it out of this world as well. The opportunity to imagine a completely new world is intriguing, and will push me to write the book faster. I hope, anyway. And if all goes well, it will give me a reason to write more books in this series too.