I’ve already changed the title on this book and now it’s time to change the main character too! Here’s the breakdown of the details of the edits of the first draft of the outline for this book:

The biggest change is switching the main and secondary characters around. I had originally intended about a 70/30 split between Jake, the main character of the first book, and Sylvia, a character introduced at the end of the first book who rises to POV character in this one. However, Sylvia’s chapters wound up being a lot more personal, intense, interesting and gripping in this book than Jake’s for a few reasons:

• Sylvia has a brand new character arc that is very different from Jake’s
  • She starts off as a bit of a bad guy making choices she knows are wrong
  • She is directly betrayed multiple times
  • She betrays people too
  • She suffers the most losses
  • She is directly involved in the organization that the plot revolves around
• Jake’s character arc on the other hand was basically a rehash of what he goes through in the first book, but with a different set of antagonists.

Repeating the same arc can work (see all the Bond movies/books) but when Sylvia is right next to him in the same book having a much better arc it feels a lot flatter. Jake will still be a POV character since he acts as a transition POV between books 1 and 2 and he has a very different attitude and point of view from Sylvia, but he will be around 30% of the book instead of 70% of it.

When I was coming up with the idea for this book my original goal was (to use a Mass Effect analogy) to have Jake be the Paragon and Sylvia to act as the Renegade and to have them working side by side conflicting and learning from each other. That idea is still intact for the most part and the “one sentence” summary for this book is still the same, but a lot of details and almost every chapter will be changed as part of the main character change. That’s fine though, this was just the first draft and it took me 3 pretty significantly different outline drafts to get the storyline of The Gray Shift good enough to start writing full text drafts. This also shows that editing the outline is a lot faster overall than editing the entire book. Completely rewriting a 22k word outline takes a while, completely rewriting an 80k word book would take 4x longer!

Here’s my current next steps:

1. Finish up edits to The Gray Shift and send them back out for editing!
2. Rewrite the outline for The Rotten Core and send it out for editing!