I was looking back on my original notes for book one as I’m finishing it off at the moment. Oddly books two and five are far nearer to finished than one is – I think it’s partly because one has changed so much over time.
So originally book one was a short story which was intended to introduce the reader to the world immediately following the events that led to the Catastrophe and the new Ice Age. It was told in flashback and it was deliberately ambiguous which of the two main perspective characters in the flashbacks was the perspective character in the ‘current’ period.
Basically it was a pragmatist and an idealist trying to survive and working out how far they were willing to go to do that. The Radio’s not there, the Union only turns up at the end and the survivor ended up being a main character in one of the side books I’d already written.
I think the story changed when I realised that I’d accidentally revealed which had survived through the existence of a beard. And I moved off to write up book five, and two and three in the course of which the background to the series became clearer and the original story no longer made a lot of thematic sense for linking into those later books.
Every time I came back to book one the story shifted a little with characters added (the Vampire escaping the continent, Camelle from Book 5 as a helper to the Vampire, the drowned men and the every one in the epilogue showing the main perspective as he was before events overtook him.)
So, here we are with a story that is nothing like the original purely through look-back setting correction and thematic shifts in the series. Book one now has only one point of view character, and that other one has slowly melted back into the background to the point where he’s arguably not even real any more and I’m a heck of a lot happier with the end result.
Not sure where the beard went. Will probably turn up on in edits as a continuity error…
Oddly I think there’s still something to be done with the original story, it was neat and dealt with moral choice a lot more than this one which gave it stronger character agency but it’s not a story for here. I might look at mixing up the setting and using it as a starting point for the second series.
Which is a major change in situation even though the setting remains the same (if a little more advanced in time…)
Ice Age in Scarlet 