SPOILERS galore in this post, natch.
I won't bore you guys with why I chose certain things (yet), but I will pepper you with hints of what may have been. Stuff that I changed mid-writing.
Now
Book Four is a whole book of "what may have been," so that's not covered here.
Book Three had a pretty rigid structure from the start, thanks to all the talk in
BSG itself about the end of days on Kobol. Other than the occasional stylistic choice or character motivation, nothing really changed until I was done.
Books One and
Two are different stories, though.
(Full examples will follow after the jump.)
Again, SPOILERS ahead, so if you haven't read the trilogy yet, please do so and then come back.
In
Book One, the revelation about the gods came much later in the novel. Also, there was more focus on the makers of the Thirteenth Tribe (Helena & Thersites). I came to realize that there should be greater attention paid the Lords. Seems pretty obvious, right? Well, part of the reason I didn't want to shine the spotlight on them too much was because doing so meant it would be harder to conceal their secret for as long as I wanted.
I decided that the reveal should come earlier in the book, some of the extraneous stuff about Helena and Thersites would be dropped and more gods stuff can be inserted. (I no longer have the deleted Helena & Thersites passages.) So I added more chapters focusing on the Lords, but a new problem arose.
A big theme for the gods in
Book One is that they're feeling stagnant after three thousand years of dominion. It doesn't do much for the mood of your novel/show/movie when characters are standing around lamenting how bored they are. I dropped the chapters relating to the non-central Lords and moved some of their dialogue into scenes with the more important characters.
There's a scene with Hecate that gives some more background for her (wait 'til you see who she was shacked up with), one focused on Aphrodite and her feelings of being "just a pretty face" in the experiment, another with her and her son, Eros and, lastly, a different version of the
Pegasus' return to Kobol with Athena and Apollo in attendance (and not Zeus - I later realized Zeus needed to be there). Full chapters are posted after the jump.
Another big thing with
Book One. Once the revelation about the gods came, the focus shifted exclusively to the gods with the occasional Thirteenth Tribe tidbit thrown in. Yes, there was Aurora and the Iole Cylon, but not much else.
That's right: the second Iole Cylon, Tydea, was not in the first pass. Nor was her realization about the Lords or the Cylon beach massacre. The Thirteenth Tribe was, as a whole, pissed at the gods and the Draco were bombing stuff, too. Very disjointed. I had to reread it a few times to pinpoint the problems and add in the intrigue with Tydea. Looking back, it's hard to fathom why I didn't do this from the start. I mean, one of Zeus' greatest fears was that the Olympians would be found out so why wouldn't I have one of his "cousins" figure it out? Stupid author. Hey, at least I recognized the problem and fixed it.
On to
Book Two. Posted below you'll find a one-off chapter with Hermes walking on another planet in the last gasp of Kobol's space program. I dropped it because it just felt like a bit of unneeded fluff.
Now here's the big thing with
Book Two. This is one of those where I got pretty far along in the writing before I realized the error of my ways. Originally, Larsa was going to be a planet on the far side of the galaxy, and Kobol was a planet they knew about that they would be jumping to. So, I typed and typed. It wasn't until I got to Zeus' big speech (outlining the "Experiment") that I realized why this wouldn't work.
I'll get into the rules I set for myself in a later post, but here's a preview. I wanted to preserve the uniquity of much of what we knew from
BSG. It was almost too late before I realized that I had violated this rule.
Baltar says in "Daybreak" while viewing the early humans on the plains of Africa that these people, on a world so far from Kobol, indicates a divine hand. OK, fine. In my first pass, I would have had humans on Larsa, Kobol and then Earth II. The absurdity of this crept up on me while Zeus is in that meeting and Prometheus is trying to tell him about God. Having humans on this planet, too, should confound Zeus and it would have given more credence to Prometheus' position (convincing more than just a few to go along with him).
Why didn't I see this before? Frankly, I was obsessed with maintaining Pythia's cycle. Humans make Cylons; Cylons and humans war; survivors flee the planet and start over somewhere else. It didn't occur to me at the start that the planet they flee and start over upon could be one and the same.
There's a sample passage from the old way posted below after the jump (no need to post full chapters, since most of the rest is the same as the published version):
Another
Book Two bit. I really liked this one, but I got rid of it because it was too long and at the very end of the novel. Once Ares finishes off the Draco and we see Zeus slump in his chair as he can't shake Hades and Leto from his thoughts, we need to tie the bow with Kaladen and the Draco's revenge and get the other side of the bookend with Apollo and Acastus. The Zeus chapter you'll find after the jump was interesting and includes lots of cool tidbits, but it just wasn't necessary.
So. If you want more
Lords of Kobol, click the JUMP and start reading. Thanks again.
