Back-Story Rewrite In Progress For Under the Darkened Moon
Well, now I’ve done it! With Under the Darkened Moon’s live read and final edits proceeding nearly side-by-side, I have decided to tear apart part of the back-story and rewrite it. It was really the last thing I was thinking of as I was happily steaming towards producing a final manuscript.
I thought the end was within sight. After all, the live read edit is in Chapter 36, the FINAL edit is in Chapter 25 and there are 44 Chapters to the story plus and epilogue.
But this rewrite had to be done. This was not something that I chose to undertake on a whim.
Prepping Chapter 42 for its shot in the barrel and a live read through, I realized that the dialogue pertaining to the back-story for one of the characters just wasn’t coming out in a logical way. That meant that the back-story wasn’t logical. And I’m a stickler for logic, which is why I have such a hard time reading science fiction! I’ll sit there and ponder whether or not every aspect of the story at least adheres to basic scientific principles or is just spouting BS and hoping no one will notice.
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Thank goodness that this back-story only pertains to a minor player in the story: Kyel’s first mentor, Lady Salvirr. But, while she is a minor character, and you likely don’t even know who she is, unless you are part of my review group, her backstory is very important. But, thankfully, it only gets glossed over at a few points in the story. That means that I get to avoid the unpleasantness of rewriting large swaths of story. In fact, according to my scribbled notes, this rewrite should only affect three parts of the story (approvimately 800 -1,200 words).
One of those parts I already rewrote last night. Or rather, I cut it out most of it. What remains is sufficiently vague so that it fits in neatly with the new back-story. The second time this back-story is reference hasn’t been touched, but will now have to tweaked. And the third occurrence is in Chapter 42 which I am currently in the middle of editing.
It is frustrating though. This back-story has been firmly in place for about eight months and I thought that it was a great back-story. But, like I said, it wasn’t. It was illogical, at least in the context of the story. It required too many leaps of faith on the part of the reader to be believed.Better to change it now though and get it right, than leave it in the mess that it currently is.
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