Ummm...oops...

I've figured out why I'm having so much trouble with the novel.

There's a fair number of characters in the story, aside from just Brynna, Georges, Scott and Lily.  There's the staff and residents of the coven, Special Agent Eckes and his team, Kath and Marina...that's a lot of people.  And in trying to juggle all those people, it feels like I've lost track of the main character.  This was supposed to be Brynna's story and I seem to be spending less time with Brynna than I am with the other characters.  When I turn my attention to the novel, I find myself thinking about Kath and Marina rather than Brynna.  It's starting to seem like Brynna's a guest star in her own novel.

So I have some work to do.  I have to drag the story back to Brynna and away from the others.  I do have plans for all those characters; Kath and Marina have their own story (titled "When The Magic Came By", the secret origins of Kath), and there is one story concerning Eckes's team (titled "Waiting", centered on Janis Mendoza, one of Eckes's werewolf agents).  So everyone gets their own stories...I just have to learn some discipline.

I do need to have Marina in the forefront for the last third of Chapter 22; she's going to do something Adam Seyfert (Eckes's mystic) can't do.  They need information from the Hunters, who are understandable unwilling to cooperate.  The answer is to have a mystic reach into their minds and pull out the information.  Seyfert can't do it because it's considered enhanced interrogation and therefore not allowed by the FBI.  Marina, not being a federal agent, is under no such constraint and literally rips the information from the mind of the Hunters' leader, leaving him a babbling mess.

After that, I have to move everyone to the side except for Brynna, Georges, Scott and Lily.  Well, Georges is still a captive of the Hunters so he's not front and center.  I'm not going to worry about the middle chapters, where the novel began to slip away from Brynna; I'll tackle them when I start editing.

Now I have to keep reminding myself whose story this is.