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Revision and Restoration

Earlier today I lopped off a chunk of chapters in the branch that starts with "Tackling a Teacher" . While keeping the earlier half, where Will copies a P.E. coach, Cathy Schell, I took out the chapters where he got caught up first with Katy Conlee and then with Stephanie Wyatt.

I never much liked those chapters. They felt like they wandered off, and I didn't much like the way things developed with Stephanie. It felt like a wrong turn.

I got a little pushback in the comments to the last entry in this blog, so I went back and read forward a little more, and found the spot where I felt that the branch had first started to weaken. I rewrote that bit, and then found that after polishing another chapter there were half-a-dozen further chapters that with no changes to only minimal changes could be (IMO at least) salvaged.

So the run of chapters that I just published -- "Picking a Brain the Old-Fashioned Way"  through "It Could Be Magic"  aren't new chapters, they are just old chapters that have been edited and relaunched.

Most of the changes reduce the amount of "magic" involved -- it was the pointless use of a mind-band on Yumi that I thought marked the first place where the branch weakened -- and I have set up different choices in some chapters. The main change comes at the end of "It Could Be Magic" . That was, for me, the second and decisive place where the story weakened, because it took the focus off Katy (where it has been building) and shifted it onto Stephanie, for no better reason (that I could see) than to pull her into hijinks.

So these six chapters now serve a different function. They are a transitional sequence where the focus changes from Will as he probes the early spells in the book, to Will as he begins to formulate motives and goals that don't have anything to do with the Libra but which might be served by it. The particular through-line that I've followed is one that aims Will pretty decisively at Katy. So, to me at least, it feels like it has more focus.

(That being said, there are off-ramps in the middle of sequence that would make it a transitional phase that reorients Will toward Stephanie. Just in a different way.)