Round and round we go

I've started on my rewrite of Renaissance's final chapters this week.  The final twenty or so chapters are about my characters boarding a supposedly derelict ship, so I started my rewrite there.

Yesterday I tackled the chapter which takes the team aboard the ship.  There they find out they're  locked out of the hallways they need to enter.  Something is stopping them getting to the centre of the ship.  And I kept on going round and round with my edits on that action.

I'd already sent drones aboard the ship to check it out before my human crew arrived, and those drones had destroyed a lot of weapons on the ship.  And they'd found dead bodies sprawled in the hallways.  But I needed to make my characters' journey to the heart of the ship dangerous and tense, so that meant I had to keep going back and altering things.

At first I had the drones find and destroy all the weapons on the ship.  But that left no room to put my characters in jeopardy from them.  So I went back and wrote in some more weapons that the drones hadn't found.  Weapons which then attack the humans when they come aboard.

Then I realised my character Elke isn't scared enough of what is happening.  She knows there are dead crew members aboard, but I wanted her to have to face them in the flesh and panic about them being dead.  So I went back and had them wearing EVA suits, so she had to take the helmets off to find out who they were.  I also had her remembering her nightmares about an attack on her ship many years ago.  She and her crew managed to survive that, but this crew didn't, and seeing the bodies   brings back all her bad memories.  That gave scope for more emotional involvement in the scene.

But the biggest reason for multiple rewrites was to work out the practical details of the scene.  Half way through as the chapter I refer to the characters' suit beacons still working, so I had to go back to the beginning and turn those beacons on.  Also, I split my boarding party in two, and half way through the chapter I suddenly mention regular radio checks.   So I had to go back to the beginning and set up that instruction.

It took me three or four rewrites to get the chapter right.  Now I have a richly detailed piece of story seen through Elke 's eyes, with all her fears and tensions.  All that work was definitely worth it.