Whose story is it?

That's the question I've had to ask myself during my rewrite of Darius.  The original manuscript is over fifteen years old, and belongs to a much earlier time in my evolution as a writer.  

In recent years I've realised I have a bias towards action in my stories.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but I have to remember that it's characters who go on adventures, and it's characters who have reactions to events, and they're what readers want to know about.

And that was one of the big problems with the original manuscript.  I described it as an ensemble cast doing things on an orbital shipyard.  Which was okay, but who was the main focus of the action, and why?

It was when I read Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet that the answers started to come to me.  That book also has an ensemble cast, with over five viewpoints.  That cast is the crew of a starship, so it's the action on the ship which ties them together.  And reading the book, I began to see how my novel could work in the same way.

It had originally been planned as the second book in a series.  The first book was all about the creation of sentient starship Chilai.  But after twenty years of re-writing that book it still lacked sparkle.  And when I saw how Becky Chambers hadn't dealt with how her sentient AI was created I realised I could do the same.  I could start with Chilai already being sentient, and lose the first book.

Becky writes of a love affair between a bodiless AI and a human in absolutely convincing, and in some places heart-rending, detail.  The relationship convinces because it's presented so confidently.  I'd always been diffident about the love between my coder Jian and Chilai.  Not any more.  Now I've written that relationship up as central to the book. 

 Now Chilai is a major viewpoint character.  Her thoughts and emotions, the way she sees the universe, differ greatly from humans.  So I needed to show her fear when someone discusses uninstalling another AI, wondering if someone could do that to her.  Could kill her.

Now the story has its focus.  The weak title Darius has changed to Combined Cognition, shifting the emphasis from the shipyard to Chilai.  The story is now built around Jian and Chilai's relationship.  All the plot events are described in terms of the impact that they have on them.  I now know whose story it is - and more importantly, why.