The Trouble With Triangles

Am I writing a romantic subplot?

I'm certainly not trying to. But it sort of seems like it's heading that way. Even though I'm trying to stop it.

Help me.

My resistance fighter chick is starting to get very touchy-feely with my space cop dude and I don't know what to do. I don't know if I can make her stop. She is very stubborn. Oh no. I can see where this is going. It might be inevitable.

Oh no.

This is not meant to be that kind of story.

This is the cover of my book, by the way, that I made solely for my own amusement:

The title Wandering Star actually means nothing in the grand scheme of the story. But I didn't want to call it Space Cops vs the Space Conspiracy, so… I had to call it something. The spaceship is called the Astr'ale. Which means, yes, "wandering star." And it sounded pretty good, so here we are.

But you can tell from the cover that it's not meant to be a romance because there's no hunky hero on the cover, embracing the buxom heroine while leaving a clear view of her lowcut top. That's what romance books look like, right? What do I know?

I know that my book seems determined to have a love triangle now, which I am definitely not going to stand for. I might not be able to stop this budding romance, but I can stop this, at least.

It all happened very accidentally. So there was this… activist dude, in the Coniurati Spei, who was mentioned sort of offhand, as a member of the group that… existed. He wasn't supposed to come back. So he had a dumb placeholder sort of name. But then he gets accused of the terrorist attack and is set to be executed (all off-screen, mind you), so now he is in it. So my space cop hero and his resistance fighter friend have to go rescue him. At which point I decide he's going to need a better name and so by the time we actually meet this character…

He's this super cool, buff, tattooed dude who's the very pinnacle of manliness named fucking Dexter (but called Dex because he's cool) who my protagonist completely hates and it's all just so wonderful. I end up with great pieces of dialogue like this:

“I get that you’re this prime specimen of masculinity, but where are your clothes?”

I don't really know where this story is going half the time, but it's okay. At least it's a fun ride.

Well, I'm still behind on my word count, so I'd better get back to it.

I'll see you next week.