Lengthening the story

I'm currently re-writing the second in my trilogy of riddle quest books.  The original rough manuscript of this second book is around fifteen years old, and it's a jumbled mess of mixed-up viewpoints.  It's also far too short at 65,000 words.

I wrote it as a rough draft because I wanted to be sure this new riddle quest worked.  I hadn't learned to chapter plan my books then, so writing the thing out was the only way I knew to do that.  In this book my characters visit art galleries all over the planet to find a series of paintings made by long-dead  Kerveen Empire painters.  Which was all very well,b but my logic for how to find the paintings was very flawed.  In fact, there was no logic at all.

When I looked at that rough draft I realised I hadn't added clues to where to find the paintings.  I think my original idea was that the landscapes in the paintings would provide the location clues, but that wasn't going to work. In the rewrite I've stated that the landscape has changed since the paintings are made, so clearly I needed something more.

So it was back to writing riddles, but how could I get them associated with the paintings?  The obvious way was to write the riddles on the labels on the backs of the paintings.  But that then gave me a new problem.  How could my characters read them if the paintings were hung up and the labels hidden? My solution was to get the curators of the institutions to make facsimile copies of the documents to display next to the paintings.  My characters' problem was solved.

One of the other things I hadn't done in the early draft was describe places in detail.  I hadn't even named the art institutions my characters visited.  And considering that one of them is an artist, that wouldn't do.  So a lot of lengthening of the original story had to be done.  The clues had to be worked out properly, the art institutions named and their collections properly described.  I also needed to start laying the groundwork for book three.

Book three only exists as a series of brief notes at present.  In that book my characters will find five Kerveen sites, the remains of their bioengineering facilities, and destroy them.  But my story lengthening has also created a renegade family head working with the antagonist.  That'll be the Supreme Ordeal of book three.  I'm pretty sure book two will be long enough now, but lengthening the story has been quite a challenge.