Yeah Beverly! Your back to writing NEBS! I LOVE that series! I've got to whole thing in hard copy here at the house.
Yeah, while I'm embarrassed to say that it's currently in incarnation 1000 and counting, I am still trying to conquer that monster.
So much so that I recently and finally made myself send a copy of SANCTUARY to Anne for the nfic archive. (Which reminds me, I still need to get access to that myself.)
Oh, and in another major attempt to motivate myself, I'm now tentatively calling the monster by a new name, HAVEN - as in HAVEN: THE NEVERENDING BATTLE FOR SANCTUARY. So, if I slip up here and use HAVEN you'll know what I'm talking about. Haven was one of the part names I played with originally years ago when I first decided to expand SANCTUARY into a full relationship story so it's been hovering in the back of my head for a long time.
I like your idea of having different villains in each phase of the story.
You probably wouldn't even recognize it now, Anne. Well, maybe YOU would, because the outline I'm using based on the major changes in their relationship is more or less the same as it's always been. Even before this last eye-opener, I'd already stripped it down to that bare relationship outline in an attempt to work in one major villain arc, which just wouldn't work. So now I'm looking for where the shifts from one villain to the next need to occur and how each can be used in an a-plot. What I find truly fascinating is how those five major villains truly mirror the shifts in her perceptions of his personas and therefore the changes in their relationship. That's something I'd never seen in the series before until the discussion here recently but it IS there. With one big exception the villains I'm using appear in the series "when" I want to use them in the story so I'll still be working mostly within series continuity. That definitely wasn't happening using just one villain arc.
Like I said, fascinating.
