Pink Slips

I'm over twenty thousand words into this story and I've just handed a pink slip to Akka, my citadel's Master Spearman. I'd thought over the last few days that a few of the scenelets I'd written from Akka's point of view really belonged to Teno, the clear villain of the story. I did a mindmap instead of plunging in and writing, and in so doing I discovered that most of Akka's motivations belonged more properly to Teno. Changing Akka to Teno left Akka as a very vestigal character indeed, so I ultimately decided to remove him entirely. This required a reshuffling of the weapons assignments amongst my weaponmasters, but it's nothing a find and replace can't fix. Now Idrega is Master Axeman (or Axewielder, depending on where my brain was when I wrote it), and can well and truly smash Teno's smug face in. 'Cos Teno is a complete jerk and he deserves to be smashed up a bit. :)

It's a bit weird to reassign character motivations and stuff like this, especially nearly halfway into the story. But it feels right. The story feels less cluttered now. The characters re more clear-cut and I can more easily point them in the directions they need to go. To Akka: sorry, dude! To my other characters: on with the story!