I’m reading the old unpublished novel to determine which seams to rip and which bits to repurpose in Eyes on the Mountain.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.
You know, leaving him uninvited is just going to make him crazier…Look at what it did to Maleficent when she wasn’t invited to the party! Watch your back!
Yeh, he’ll be angry. But that’s his default condition. At least this way, he won’t have his hand chopped off.