Words/Time: 992 words, revising “Pithea.” I’m going to go into more detail on the actual story than I normally do here, so bear with me. The book I am working on right now is a full rewrite of 5 shortish stories that I wrote as fanfiction around 10 years ago. They were fanfiction based on a video game that had very little plot of its own, so the plots and characters were completely my own invention.

Cut to more recent years, and I’ve built a new world of my own that will mostly accommodate those stories, yet be different from the game (in some ways, very different). The original stories were written as third-person limited POV, while this book is actually first-person, but told from a side character who is only in the second half of the book (and even then, somewhat sporadically). The part of the story I am working on now is when the main character meets the narrator character for the first time.

Originally, it went that Missy (the MC) had already seen Drear (the narrator) from a distance, and he’d kind of creeped her out. So when she found him later, bent over her sick friend, she assumed the worst. And that led to situations in which she mistrusted him, and it made perfect sense.

In the rewritten book, I tried to keep that mistrust (and the mystery about Drear being the brother of that sick friend). But basically, Missy has to break into Drear’s house and then act indignant. Drear’s identity being a secret is really forced, and his subsequent reveal is just clumsy.

So, though I’m very used to these scenes being one way (Drear doesn’t identify himself and Missy has good cause to think he’s untrustworthy) for 10 years, I am now finding that I have to almost completely re-plot what happens from this point forward. There’s no reason Missy can’t know right away who Drear is (he introduces himself at the beginning of the book and says he’s the brother of that other character), so I’m basically going to be rewriting the next several chapters. Which is kind of nice, because I’ve been missing the actual writing lately.