Every book reaches a moment where the plot stops needing more monsters, explosions, or twists —
and starts needing a person.

Not a hero.
Not a villain.
Not a love interest.

A functional adult who walks onstage and stabilizes the room simply by existing.

Someone who knows the world already.
Someone who has been through hell and can translate the map for the kids.
Someone who actually knows where the damn silver bullets are kept.

For WOLF WOUNDS, that person is Bobby.

What’s fascinating is that Bobby wasn’t some lightning-in-the-veins original creation.
He wasn’t the product of months of character work.

He started as a deliberate placeholder.

A trope I intentionally copied so I could keep the story moving.

And that choice — that willingness to write something imperfect just to keep momentum — ended up producing one of the most emotionally vital characters in the entire narrative.

Here’s how he came to be.

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1. I Needed a Hunter Uncle — the Story Demanded It

WOLF WOUNDS began as a tight, tragic two-person road story:

• Lily, the addict
• Mark, the werewolf

Then the world blew open:

• monster trafficking rings,
• Cold-War occult silos,
• psychic children,
• Dominion black-ops programs.

Suddenly the book needed infrastructure.

I needed a character who could:

• know the supernatural world
• rescue Lily when shit hit the fan
• build weapons
• drive an armored van
• explain Dominion without infodumping
• ground the horror with humor and grit
• die in a way that matters

That’s not a love interest.
Not a villain.
Not Mark.
Not Lily.

That’s your classic Monster Uncle.

Supernatural has Bobby Singer.
Most urban fantasy has someone in that slot.

My story needed one.

So I said:

“Fine. Bobby Singer. Put him here.
I’ll mutate him later.”

And I did.

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2. Placeholder Characters Are Scaffolding — Not Cheating

There’s a weird purity myth in writing that says every character must appear fully formed and wildly original or you’re doing something wrong.

Bullshit.

Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is:

• recognize the archetype you need,
• drop in a temporary version of it,
• get the draft rolling,
• and fix the originality later when your brain can breathe.

Good writing is often good pattern recognition.
I saw the hole in the story.
I saw the tool I needed.
I used it.

The trick is to admit it and keep going.

So I wrote “Bobby” — very close to the Bobby Singer model — as a structural brace.

Not forever.
Just enough to keep the story alive.

And then something great happened:

He started mutating on his own.

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3. When Bobby Entered the Story, He Entered Fully Alive

His first scene wrote itself.

Lily is surrounded by psychic constructs in a ghost town — Dominion’s stitched horrors closing in.

And suddenly:

• armored van
• sigils painted on the doors
• shotgun shells rattling on the dash
• tires skidding
• a voice yelling:
  “MOVE, GIRL!”

He was rough, exasperated, deeply competent.

And more importantly:

Lily trusted him instantly.

Why?

Because Bobby walks in like someone who has already lived a whole lifetime in this world.
He shows up the way a fireman shows up to a burning building — not shocked, just resigned.

That’s when I realized:

He’s not a placeholder anymore.
He’s a load-bearing beam.

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4. Bobby Became My Character When I Made Him Half-Banshee

This is where he stopped being CW’s Bobby and became Francis Anderson’s Bobby.

I gave him banshee ancestry.

Not the Irish-folklore pretty version.
The dangerous version.

A scream that can kill.
A voice that can break steel.
Heightened hearing.
A sense of death approaching.

And — most importantly — a deep fear of losing control.

Because if he screams too hard, too long, too emotionally, people die.

Suddenly the archetype twisted toward your central themes:

• bipolar volatility
• fits of rage
• the terror of losing control
• shame around destructive power
• the need to “manage” yourself for the sake of others
• being dangerous without wanting to be

He’s not Bobby Singer.
He’s a man who has spent his whole life learning how to aim the one part of himself that can destroy the people he loves.

When he tells Lily,

“I’ll hold them off,”
you believe him.

When he dies screaming his lungs out in the Vault,
you feel it.

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5. Bobby’s Relationship With Lily Is One of the Emotional Hearts of the Story

Lily spends most of the book being:

• guilty,
• shaken,
• addicted,
• trying to save Mark,
• and trying not to fall apart.

Bobby treats her like someone worth saving — not out of romance, not obligation, but recognition.

He respects her grit.
He sees the survivor in her.
He talks to her like she still has a future.

He’s not her father.
Not her boyfriend.
Not her boss.

He’s the first adult in the entire narrative who believes she’s more than her relapse cycle.

That bond gives her strength to make her final sacrifice.

And ironically —
Bobby’s existence makes Lily’s death hit harder, because he was one more person who believed in her.

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6. Bobby’s Death Is Not Just a Cool Moment — It’s the Thematic Spike

His final stand in the Vault is one of the emotional peaks of the book:

• Dominion forces flooding the floor
• Sara and the boy needing escape
• Mark agonizing through transformation
• Lily trying to reach him
• Everything collapsing at once

Bobby stays behind.

He unleashes his full banshee scream — the one he’s been terrified of his whole life.

He dies bleeding from every hole in his head, with a crater ripped into the floor around him.

His last words:

“Don’t let all this be for nothin’.”

His death isn’t shock value.
It’s the moment the story says:

“Even ordinary people can be heroic as hell.”

And he buys them the time to survive.

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7. Why This Process Matters (The Craft Lesson)

Bobby is proof of a writing truth I live by:

You don’t need the perfect version of a character to start the book.
You just need someone to stand in the doorway long enough for the real version to emerge.

I knew I needed:

• a lore-carrier,
• a weaponsmith,
• a friend,
• a moral center.

I didn’t have the “perfectly original” version yet.

So I used the archetype.

Then let the story sharpen him.
Then let your themes twist him.
Then let the book claim him.

By the time the Vault collapses, Bobby is no longer “Bobby from Supernatural.”
He’s:

• half-banshee
• half-mechanic
• all heart
• all tragedy
• all grit
• and fully woven into the emotional architecture of the book

And that happened because I didn’t stall waiting for the ideal character.

I wrote the scaffolding and trusted myself to refine it.

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8. The Bobby That Exists Now

He’s:

• mid-40s/50s
• half banshee
• drives an armored occult van
• knows Dominion’s secrets
• knows Caleb’s routes
• takes care of broken kids
• respects Lily
• saves her life
• dies saving all of them
• and leaves a hole that can’t be patched

He started life as a trope.

But he ended up as the character who makes the whole damn story feel like it has a soul.