Spent Friday night mostly picking apart and reassembling what are now chapters 6 and 10 of TIWTBWO #1, which are by far the trickiest bits in this rewrite.
(The story concerns four people who have been sent into a situation that was badly misread, and needs something closer to four hundred people to handle; the four hundred people are on their way once the right people can be gathered and transported, and should be there fairly soon, and the four who are already there are struggling to hold it together in the mean time. The previous draft opened with a bang, as it were, and with my protagonist and her colleagues as the obvious suspects for that bang, and the chapters I am talking about were the first on-stage introductions of colleagues #1 and #2. After having it pointed out that that structure created an expectation that the book, and indeed the series, would be focused on the police-procedural/mystery aspects more than it turns out to be, I've gone back to put two more chapters on the beginning, with these four people arriving in the situation in the first place, to introduce the broader context and clarify the scale that I want readers thinking on and caring about. This has made what those first-after-the-bang scenes have to do really quite different; I think they now work on content, but I need to let them sit for a week and reread them to make sure that all this fiddling flows smoothly. I'll probably have a similar wrestle with chapter 15 or 16 where I had previously been first introducing colleague #3, but I doubt it will be as rough as 10 was.) During which all I would seem to have cut about 150 words and written about 800 new.
