A fusion of old and new

I'm still on the quest to resurrect my thirty years old novels, and it's proving quite a task.  I'm combining three manuscripts into one.  I'm taking scenes from each one and mixing them together.

Some of the information in those novels has since been shunted to a proposed new novel about one of the main characters.  I've got a complete chapter plan for that book, and this new book has to mesh with it.  I've discarded about two-thirds of the original first novel.

When I wrote the original avatars didn't exist.  Now many SF novels regularly contain them, so now my ship character has one too.  I've stolen an idea from Becky Chambers' A Closed and Common Orbit, and made the avatar look like a petbot.  But I'm going to make my avatar a repurposed military stealth attack bot.  That will allow him to hack any feed he encounters, have weapons in his forearms, and serious sensing systems in his eyes.

Delving back into the old, I have a kick-ass female engineer suffering from sex discrimination in her career.  She's a good friend of my main character, and I'm going to keep the relationship and the discrimination in the new book.  So I'm also keeping the scenes where the engineer is nearly murdered, and later nearly raped.

In the original I had several different people attacking the orbital shipyard where the action takes place.  Even I had trouble keeping track of who did what, and the poor reader would've had no chance.  In this new book, both my main character and a minor character have opposed the Oriellish's applications for planetary settlement.  That's my motive for Oriellish wanting to get them.

The Oriellish are beginning to hate humans in general.  Cue biomass plant sabotage, hydroponics facilities sabotage, ship sabotage, and all sorts of people getting attacked, and some killed.  Which led me to the next problem: how to organise this sprawl of information? The answer was to split it into two books, which it was originally.

I now have a whiteboard full of post-it notes of key scenes, which I keep rearranging.  This re-write is proving much trickier than anything I've done before.  But I've always loved the characters and the setting of those books, and re-inventing them for the twenty-first century will be a task well worth all the effort.