Behind the Flesh: The Biggest Changes to In the Way of All Flesh (Patreon)

I always knew intellectually that a book goes through a huge number of drafts and things can change drastically, but just knowing it doesn't prepare you for writing a book. Above are a collection of just SOME of my drafts (collected via Scrivner), to give you some idea of how many edits the book went through. you can see my frustration in some of the draft titles (draft two billion, etc.) The amount of changes this book throughout the course of seven years are almost unfathomable, even to me.

Of course, the first and most obvious change is the title- my placeholder title for the book was "(She Wore) The Grim Reaper's Wedding Veil".I knew it was extremely goofy and campy sounding but I have a fondness for it. The idea behind it was smashing together the idea of death as going"beyond the veil" and tying that to how my  main character uses a veil-like piece of clothing to keep herself from touching people, as well as tying in the "romance" aspect. Eventually I knew I had to change the title, and looking for metaphors for death, I chose "In the Way of All Flesh" because it refers to a old-timey phrase for dying ("go the way of all flesh) and also invokes the idea  of skin and touch, another major conceit of the book.

When looking at the actual contents of the story though, the biggest change to the book's overall plot is that the first couple drafts had a murder mystery subplot/climax going. There are murders happening! Stephanie urges Manee to use her powers to find the murderer's next victim (so she can see who the murderer is via her visions), Manee thinks its pointless to fight fate, etc. But the whole murder thing was just way too divorced from Manee and Stephanie's emotional journey, and just didn't tie into their story at all. At first the murder victims weren't even people they KNEW, I just had it mentioned that murders were happening in the news and Stephanie wanted to do something about it. Then I tried to tie it in more by having ONE of the victims be someone Stephanie and Manee were acquainted with- but even that didn't tie it in enough, and left me with the problem of having to fit in their grieving too, when there was already a lot of other grieving going on in the book.

Plus there was the problem of the murderer needing to dump all of his backstory at the end of the novel. With so much else going on in the book, there wasn't enough room to seed in his motivations or foreshadow them too well, so it meant he had to spell them out in a cackling villainous monologue while Manee was helpless and that really did not work.

SPOILER WARNING HERE. This will get into some details that will spoil plot elements of the actual book.

Here's some fun trivia: the murderer was  Manee's sister's boyfriend, Zack. Stephanie's brother, Tony (who, if you've read the book by now, you know has some issues) was a red herring who Manee believed was the murderer but SURPRISE he wasn't, he's just a regular asshole! The violent confrontation Manee and Tony have at the end of the book was originally between Zack and Manee. But like I said, it just didn't work to have Zack and his motivations in the mix. It made much more sense to just have Tony, who was already an unstable jerk, turn murderous for the sake of a dramatic climax. So the plot changed, and Zack became MUCH less of an asshole while Tony became a bit more of one. It's sad for Tony, but them's the breaks.

By the way, the murder victim Manee and Stephanie knew was going to be Ms. Carnahan! So she was spared a grisly fate. The problem with removing the murders were it took away the reason for Manee and Stephanie to suddenly come into conflict about Manee's powers again, but I solved that by making the conflict Ms. Carnahan's depression, which tied in better with the themes of the book AND made the first part of the book with Callie better connected to the later events, which was also something I was struggling with. 

I do like the backstory I came up with for Zack and his motivations, so if I ever do a followup to this story, I'd make the murder mystery the main plot and give the killer the same motives. It'd be interesting seeing an older Manee and Stephanie solving murders and dealing with that.

There's a lot of other big changes I made- I struggled with how much of Manee's backstory with Jocelyn to include,with whether I should do full on flashback scenes or what, as you can see from some of the draft titles if you squint. I also rewrote Jocelyn several times, originally she had different mental disorders and so on, but I felt like I couldn't write that effectively and she was a bit of a caricature. So like Manee, she simply suffers from severe depression. 

Then I cut down the backstory with Joc to the bare minimum because going into it in depth became too much of a detour from the main plot. There used to be scenes in the book that made it clearer what Manee saw and why it was the worst thing possible for Jocelyn, but I decided even that could be left up to the reader's imagination. Maybe I'll try posting a little of those scenes if there's interest! Let me know!

Spoilers End

So yup, this book went through quite a transformation! I went through a phase where I was telling the story non chronologically, starting with Manee's discovery she would kill Stephanie and telling other scenes in flashback. That did not work. But I did eventually change the entire thing from third person past tense to first person present tense, which suited it a lot better.

So, however flawed the version out there is now, it's at least miles better than previous drafts. It really is the best version of itself I could manage, and I hope you all enjoy it.