The Lost - some yammering about the excerpt below

PBW recently posted about writing a dangerous book. Considering I should be working a second contemporary romance to follow up Felicity Stripped Bare, this wip could be considered my dangerous book. There's also the fact that I've never written any type of story with a fantasy subplot or framework, no do I read a lot of fantasy, yet here I am mired in this one.

Still, I love it. I *think* I might have something here, something I'd like to build on more "loosely" connected books. I had a lot of false starts with contained bits of true scenes with this wip. A lot of the writing I've been doing on the mss therefore has been about weaving those true bits into this latest version of the story. When I say final, I don't mean that it won't undergo any revisions/edits, just that I think this is the right story I want to tell.

Anywho, I love the villain. I was working on the first scene with him yesterday and he comes across as menacing and someone to be feared. I intend to have A Lot of fun building on and justifying that menace, but I want it to be shades of gray. For instance, one of the things I worked on yesterday was digging into his background to find out why he is the way he is, and that those reasons are absolutely *sympathetic* to the reader. In another book he could have been the angsty hero with the tortured background.

There's an actor who vaguely reminds me of the character (I'm not posting the pic because I have yet to find an actor/model who looks the way I see my characters and I don't want to plant his image in any potential readers' heads.) In googling his picture I came across a tidbit about a character he'd played which gave me my character's first name (I've only been referring to him by his surname). The whole name is a bit much. lol. But I don't care. It feels *right*; besides he made never be referred to by his whole and/or first names, it's just something for me to know.

So without further nattering on my part go ahead and read the post below for the first sight of Arch Duke Scaramouche Ferdinand Buenbrazo, High Sorcerer of Tovence.