How the heck did that happen?

Now that I've finished the first draft of Complications From Lycanthropy, I'm going back to do revisions on Pack Mentality. (It actually doesn't need nearly the rewrite I feared it would at the end of October, when I finished it.)

One of the things I've done is to read back through it and make note of the changes I want to make in each chapter. As part of that, I also made out a timeline of what events happen when, so I can get weather and stuff reasonable and as a general guide. That's not too hard when the characters' lives revolve around the full moon, so most of the events are nicely laid out in relation to one.

Now, one of my frustrations when first writing this is that it's supposed to be following Remus during the first half of Half-Blood Prince, between when Harry saw him in July and then again in December. Only when I'd laid out my brainstorming of how much time happened between events, it just wouldn't squish in there. So I decided screw it, I wasn't going to sacrifice the integrity of my story to squeeze into a canon I didn't particularly like anyway, and just wrote it as it needed to be written.

Now that I've gone back and written out the actual timeline, it drops in perfectly. It starts August 28 and ends a couple of weeks before Christmas. I have no idea how the hell that happened, but it works.

I also am again convinced that Rowling did not consult a lunar calendar in regards to her werewolf character's appearances.

Yay! It's finished!

Finally finished the first draft of Complications From Lycanthropy. Naturally, it's very much a first draft -- a terrible mess that will bear hardly any resemblance at all to draft 2. Now I'm very glad I didn't let many people read draft 1. But I've got all the critical flashbacks well laid out now, and even though the frame story will drastically change, I do have the most important incidents there as well. Go me!

Since the last chunk is all hand-written in notebooks, my plan from here is to spend my usual writing time typing it up, and then switching over to Pack Mentality and starting the first major revision on that story. Not only does that give Complications time to rest, but events in the two stories are shared and influence each other, so having the first draft of Complications done gives me a better idea of how some things should go in Pack Mentality.