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Editing Fails

The editing continues, and tonight wound up in a mess. If you've seen chapters appearing and disappearing, it's because I messed up. But by the time you read this post, it should have reverted to the way it was.

With one very important edit to one chapter.

I'm working in the branch where Will swaps places with Gary Chen. It's one of my favorites, but if I'm going to stick to my principles, I find that I am going to have to chop about two hundred chapters out of it. There's big continuity issues with it, as I worried there would be.

One problem is with the mask-memory lore. This branch was written before it became canonical that people other than Will have a hard time getting the memories when a mind-band is glued into a mask. As I went through, I was able to fudge the issue at a couple of points with some light edits. But "Criss Cross Consequences"  could not be fixed with edits: at this point the plot requires that one of the confederates get a lot of memories pretty quickly.

I suppose that a complete rewrite of the chapter, and revisions of subsequent chapters, could have handled it. But there was a much bigger problem.

Frank and Joe.

When I wrote this branch, I didn't worry or wonder what they were up. I was uneasily aware that they were loitering in the background, but powered through anyway.

Eventually, though, when it came time to write "The Sophomore Candidates"  and its sequels, I decided I couldn't ignore them any longer. They play basketball at Eastman, which means they would be privy to gossip about the WHS team, and Gordon Black's personality change would naturally catch the attention of the EHS squad -- and it would excite the interest and suspicion of the Durrases. So in "The Sophomore Candidates" I bit the bullet and gave them an entry point: by a certain date (October 20) they would be enrolled at WHS and sniffing around the body-swapped Gordon and Dane.

As I was reading the "Gary Chen" branch, then, I was keeping track of dates in order to make sure that I kept consistent with "The Sophomore Candidates," and I discovered that I would actually have to move the Durrases' arrival up by a week, because Gordon's quitting the squad occurs a week earlier in the "Chen" chapters than in the "Sophomore" chapters. (That's a knock-on effect of Will fighting with the real Chen.) And that meant that the Durrases would be entering sooner rather than later, forcing a massive and unavoidable change in the story. Because that change was coming up fast anyway, I have decided that it will be better to break off the branch with "A Musician's Transposition" , which is the last chapter that will not run into serious continuity issues.

I have not lopped off the rest of the branch yet. It will be the work of several days moving chapters over the NC-BoM version.