Project Report: Gods Tomorrow

On Tuesday of last week, I completed my first major rewrite of Gods Tomorrow.

I finished the novel back in November, and immediately knew that there were some key elements that I needed to change. Chief among them was the prominence of Katie's boyfriend Marshall in chapters 2-4 (he then disappears altogether for the rest of the book).

As I considered my options for tweaking that relationship, one obvious option that leapt out to me was to replace her conversations with Marshall with conversations with her dad. He does play a major role through the rest of the novel, albeit as a historical reference rather than an actual actor in the plot. Ultimately I decided to use voicemail recordings to her father that she uses in the form of a diary, rather than actual conversations. For reasons that the reader can only guess at, her father never actually takes any of the calls, which changed the tenor of those scenes from the brief bright spots in the early part of the book (where her boyfriend cheers her up after a frustrating day at the office) to a pitiful showcase of Katie's loneliness in her new life.

I offset that a bit by toning down the "new girl" feel of the first few chapters -- one of few complaints that I'd consistently gotten from my test readers. Actually, most of them suggested that I had done a good job of making Katie likeable by showing her vulnerability, but that eventually the book hit a sort of, "Get on with it!" level, where the character flaw was clearly established and I was just beating a dead horse.

I mostly addressed that issue by going through the relevant chapters and doing what I could to get the narrative out of Katie's head (something I'm constantly encouraging my sisters and Dad to do as I critique their stories). I showed enough of her insecurity through her actions, without beating the reader over the head with her internal responses. At least, that was my goal. The one test reader who has seen the new version said it came across well (but he had never seen the first draft).

I also significantly expanded the chapter in Little Rock, in which Katie practices traditional police work (which is essentially her role in the story, while those around her are more versed in high technology). My initial outline for the novel required exactly the sort of scenes that I added, but when I got to that point in the first draft I was ahead of my word count projection and felt like the story flowed more organically by skipping ahead to her meeting with Martin.

In the rewrite, I went ahead and incorporated the scenes I'd planned from the start, and I think they not only help establish Katie's character strongly enough to better carry her through the muted scenes that follow, but also significantly improve the introduction of Martin's character over the rough draft version (which was basically just a repeat of the introduction of Ghoster, which was disappointing to several test readers, myself included).

Beyond that, I changed some wording issues to impact the feel of the novel (primarily the way each of the other major players addresses Katie, from scene to scene, for consistency), and then cleaned up the ending. From the start it had a strongly action-movie ending (read: believability issues), and it felt unfortunately rushed to me. In the first week of December I did a quick rewrite to clean that up a little (extending the closing into two chapters instead of one), and kept tinkering with it over the next couple months. In my big rewrite in February, I completely revisited everything that happens during the climax and denouement, and toned down a lot of the special effects material while leaving the plot essentially unchanged.

Status: Complete, second draft