I’m reading the old unpublished novel to determine which seams to rip and which bits to repurpose in Eyes on the Mountain. It’s been decades since I looked at it, and I’m reacting differently now to the old characters; I’m liking ones I didn’t much, and I’m irritated by ones I used to find interesting. That’s shaping my thinking about which of them will appear in Eyes.
There are two fourteen-year-olds I quite enjoy, and one cranky eighty-year-old woman whose point of view I appreciate now in ways I didn’t before. But man, I really did a crap job on the villain; he’s over-the-top crazy unbelievable and is definitely not invited to the new novel.