Mindfluff asked Abigail Roux:

I think I remember reading on your AskAbi page that originally Madeline had a much darker plan for Zane. Now that Ty & Zane's story is over (except for the vignettes which I live for), could you share what that plan was?

Abigail Roux Actually, you read that in an interview I did for the Crash & Burn blog tour, and there's not much more to share than what you've already read (the post is still up, here: http://lovebytesreviews.com/2015/04/0... )

But here's a TL;DR version: When I took on the series solo, I didn't inherit a lot to go on re: Zane and his arc and his background. I had to use scenes of books we'd already written, and the very few things my former co-writer had shared with me in messages about her creation of the character.

One of the very last scenes written of Zane before the split was the one I shared in that blog post, where Zane receives a call telling him that Ty is dead, and his very first instinct is to put his gun to his head with his finger on the trigger because life just wasn't worth it if he didn't have Ty with him. This is a scene where the BAD GUY is telling him Ty is dead, and yet his first instinct is not to rage or go out to find them, it's to put his gun to his head.

That is not a Zane any of us want to know.

That Zane is still the Zane from the first 7 books, the one who views Ty as a crutch, a drug, as just another addiction to feed. In the last act of the last book, that's just unacceptable. There's no character development there, there's no growth, there's no HOPE. Intending for Zane to float through 9 entire books, depressed and dark and hopeless, with only one thing to live for? The thought just broke my heart.

That's when I scrapped everything I had on Zane, and began to make a plan that would have him rise from the ashes of the first 4 books as a phoenix, instead of wallowing in them.

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