So, as I have every year since NaNoWriMo's official website was replaced with a hideous, non-functional monstrosity that trashed all my past projects, I am unofficially participating in NaNoWriMo this year. Because I was always much more into the writing part than the "official writing community" part anyway, so why should I force myself to deal with a site that thinks its hideous cover art is more important than my words?
And, since I'm already rebelling anyway, I'm doubly rebelling by doing a rewrite rather than writing a brand new novel. This time, I'm rewriting The Golden God of Aiolia, the second novel in a series of kinda-sorta-YA novels I first wrote back in 2014, and which I reread last year during the COVID lockdown (though as I'm still unemployed--aside from online freelance work--I'm basically still in a personal lockdown situation) and decided to polish up and release. (The first one is currently online in both a minimally interactive "game" format and in a text-only format on AO3, though I'm wanting to post it somewhere else in a text-only format, which is going to be the subject of its own post in a few days...)
I'm following my standard rewrite process, in which I open the new draft (well, for today, that was just plain starting a new document) and the old draft, then use the "arrange all" function on Word so I have one on top of the screen and the other on the bottom. Then I just start writing, sometimes simply retyping what's in the old document, other times writing new text to fit the same basic sentiment as what was in the old one, and sometimes just writing something entirely new, depending on what a particular passage needed. Even in the passages where the plan is just to retype, I typically notice minor things that need fixing in passing, and it ends up having a lot more changes than I was expecting.
As an example of the kinds of changes I'm making, I wanted to share this partial paragraph from the opening "reminding everyone of the big stuff from book one regarding who the characters are and stuff" sequence (which I never really bothered with in the other five books, but for some reason it just feels right here so I couldn't quite bring myself to remove it). So, the following paragraph is the original version, and the underlined section is the part I had initially marked as needing revision:
Eurysakes, son of Telamonian Aias, had met them at the grave of Atalanta's father, having been sent there by a prophecy to await the ones who would help him allow his father's shade to rest peacefully. Atalanta still only knew partial details of Aias' death: Apollo himself had told her that Athene had driven Aias to madness and suicide to protect Odysseus, but that information had left her with just as many questions as she had had before! And, of course, there was also Aias' long-standing, unsettled rivalry with Achilles. That also seemed to play some role in Eurysakes' quest, but Atalanta wasn't quite sure how.
And here's the new version:
Though he was also her cousin, Atalanta had only met Eurysakes recently, when she finally got to pay her respects at her father's grave. He was the son of Telamonian Aias, who had been her father's cousin, and he had been waiting at the grave just to meet her and Ariadne, having been sent there by an oracle to await the ones who would help him relieve the unrest that was plaguing his father's shade. Eurysakes hadn't gone into much detail about just why his father's shade couldn't rest, though. It was something to do with the way he had died, she was pretty sure, but she still only knew partial details of Aias' death: Apollo himself had told her that Athene had driven Aias to madness and suicide to protect Odysseus, but that information had left her with even more questions than she had had before! But it also seemed like maybe some of Aias' discomfort in death had to do with his long-standing, unsettled rivalry with Atalanta's father, Achilles, but Atalanta wasn't entirely sure what role that rivalry played in Eurysakes' quest to restore his father's honor in the eyes of the world.
It's maybe not a huge difference, but I feel like the new version did a much better job explaining Eurysakes' situation and quest. (His quest being a huge part of book two, it was especially important to explain it here! That may actually be why I felt like I had to leave the catch-up sequence in this one, because it's so much more tied into the past events than the others; in book three, they finally learn about the real plot of the series, so from that point on, it's more concerned with the future and their own actions than their fathers.) As you might have guessed from that passage, this is set less than twenty years after the Trojan War, and all three of the young leads are the children of Greek heroes from said war. (Ariadne's father is Odysseus, which is surprisingly not a problem for Eurysakes. It should have been, really, but since book one is already out there, it's too late to make it a problem.)
I like to write first thing in the morning--well, first thing after Animal Crossing, anyway--so I've already done today's writing (though I could always go back and do more, I suppose). I'm keeping track--among other things--of how different the lengths of the sections are compared to what they were initially, to have an idea how much I'm adding (or I suppose in theory subtracting?) as I go. The prologue, which had fairly minimal planned alteration and not that much unplanned either, started out at 1,082 words, and the new draft's version is 1,170 words. So not a lot different. I haven't finished rewriting the first chapter (of the 2014 draft) yet, though.
Today's total word count is 6,172 words.
So far so good. :)
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