As I mentioned last Friday, the second draft of Let No Man Put Asunder is now done. Though technically I suppose it’s more like the eighth draft: this is a rewrite of a novel I finished in the 1990s, which was a rewrite of my second novel from back in the 1980s. The title has remained, nothing else is the same.
(As I don’t have any book-relevant illustrations, the photos will be random)
Okay, one thing remained the same, the core concept of two people, an older woman and a younger man, meeting and forming a telepathic link, one that downloaded all their memories into each other. The original 1980s version had them pretty happy before things began to happen; I went with “ordinary person caught up in a deadly dangerous game” rather than “protagonist with a personal problem resolves it by getting caught up in a deadly dangerous game.”
The 1990s rewrite made everything considerably weirder and more imaginative as they wandered through various nightmare worlds running from the mercenaries hired by their mysterious, unknown enemy. In the 1980s version, their enemy saw them as a threat and wanted them dead; at the climax he turns out to have a weakness that isn’t set up in advance. The 1990s take established he’s a psionic who kills anyone he sees as a threat to his power — and that’s pretty much anyone with similar abilities. His weakness is that he’s always struck and killed swiftly and never learned to fight a protracted battle; when my protagonists, Adrienne and Neil, confront him at the climax, they survive long enough that his confidence cracks. For someone whose powers stem from his force of will, that proved a fatal weakness.
The reason Adrienne and Paul were a threat remained the same in both versions. It doesn’t work for Paul and Mandy in the current version. The Community of All is simply too big and too powerful a foe, with different motivations … so why were they a threat to it? And how could they beat it?
Suffice to say, I figured it out. There is a reason the Community is hunting them down. And I think it works. Having found an ending to the plot, however, I still need one more draft. I need to sharpen the character arcs — both Paul and Mandy are in worse places at the start than Adrienne and Neil were. And I’m not sure those character arcs end satisfactorily. The 1990s version was Part One of a duology; this ending makes the book a standalone. The adventure is over, their immediate problems have been resolved, but I still want to show where they’re heading next. Paul, for example, was supposed to end up in a relationship with one of the supporting characters: this draft that didn’t happen, though I may change that back.
In September I’ll read over the story and take notes, then start mapping out what needs to happen — beats in the character arc, and the like. I’m tentatively optimistic I can finish by the end of the year and then send it out for beta reading, alongside getting the final proofing done on Watching Jekyll and Hyde.
Wish me luck.
