For this one, the title really says it all – rewrites are ridiculously hard, worse when it’s book 3 of 7 fully posted books in a serial, the first two of which have been lightly polished and unleashed in both ebook and paperback formats. What series is this, you ask?
Awakenings, of course. A serial and series so long in the making, the winding road of starts and stops and restarts and imaginings. Of course it’s a difficult beast to wrangle. In some ways, wrangling the rewrite for book three, Omens and Echoes, is that much harder because of what’s come before–and what I know I want to come after.
In many ways, Omens and Echoes will be the first true rewrite of the series, with added chapters and more than likely some chapters pulled in their entirety or rewritten significantly. Why? Because the story took such a different turn from where I thought it was going in the original draft. I have the benefit of hindsight, now, and more of a road map to where I want to go.
Let’s be honest: anyone reading the first few books of the series would be shocked by what happens by book five (and anyone who’s read the serial probably knows exactly what I’m talking about). The reality is that there are many things that I could do differently and better than I did in the original serialized version, things that I want to do.
it’s just figuring out what stays, what goes, and what the new pieces and undercurrents will be, in addition to smoothing out continuity errors and fixing things here and there. I have accepted that there will always be a few, but I’ve also accepted that those few can also be chalked up to certain characters perhaps not revealing the whole truth, or being delirious, or visions not actually reflecting reality.
I won’t say it’s all fun and games–but I won’t say that it’s not, either.
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