A few days ago, after having several repetitive dreams dealing with someone I knew at the University of Illinois, I decided to pull out The Ballad of Katie Hart and get back to work on it. It had stalled out in the seventh chapter and I'd never been able to get it going again.
And as I was thinking about the scene in which Sergei Gerasimov's clone-brother is talking with two of the Stalin clones and one makes a scathing remark about just what Katie sees in Ferdinand Yabur, and I realized that I had a major logic hole. Never once have I established what exactly had led to Katie becoming so emotionally obsessed with a man who was actively disliked by at least one major POV character, and who was despised by several others because of his obliviousness to the strife his wife was sowing.
Once I saw that logic hole, I also realized that the characters of both Ferdinand and Marie Yabur were effectively black boxes. Their inner lives were completely opaque to the reader, with no evidence of their motivations except those attributed to them by POV characters who had absolutely no reason to think well of them.
I think at least part of the problem is that the novel had its beginnings as a roman a clef, and Marie Yabur in particular was based upon someone I regarded as an implacable enemy. But to make it work, I somehow have to get inside the headspace of these two characters and find a way to show what is making them go.
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