Right, so this might end up a bit long.
Demetori was started as a book named Luna Darkdawn back when I was twelve on a very old and weird site named Figment (I checked and it has since been redone and isn't a user based writing website anymore) -- this was eight years ago. Since then I've re-written Luna Darkdawn/Demetori about 8 times. I always come back to it every year and decide whether I'm happy with it. The only year I've been happy with it is this year.
The only plot thread that has stayed consistent is the beginning of the book and the villain being her father.
In the original manuscript, which I cannot bring myself to open because it is so cringy, it actually turns into a bit of a love story, this is when I thought I was straight and therefore gays did not exist in my mind. Since then the protagonist has been a lesbian and there are other LGBTQ+ roles in the book.
The book basically grew with me. Other chracters such as a Trans character named Lydia was originally supposed to be the protagonists aunt who eventually went on to take care of the protagonist, but she was reworked and I made her into a family friend with very different motives. In the original manuscript the protagonists mother had died but in their youth had been an immortal maiden destined to take care of a gods library who gives up her immortality for love. Now she still has a mysterious background, but it's a bit more grounded within how the book currently works.
I also around five years ago, when I was going through A-Levels, reworked all of the world the book was set in and actually wrote it all down. I'll show you a little of what I mean in screenshots.
For context, when I was about 12 years old, I wrote three books named The Elven Wars Trilogy. They were basically novellas but I was very into High Fantasy at this point so I wanted to delve into it, which was also set in this one world that I built. To encorporate it into the world I set up different periods of time where magic functioned similar but with key changes.
In this screenshot you can see some of my planning, I went into the map, the countries involved, how the magic system worked, what races were in the world, the heriarchy of their royalty and government, all their policies, whether they were right or left wing. For context I was about 16 when doing this so there were inconsistencies. But overall this is still the world codex I use today for all my fantasy books and short stories, this means that all my fantasy work is generally set within the same universe just in different time periods and they connect pretty well when you read them back to back.
Another thing I have been very strict on in the past few years is how the magic systems worked, which I'm not going to go into here because spoilers, but here's a list of (some of) the types of mages in the book and how they sort of work. The names have since been updated, eg Aquamancer is now Hydromancer. Spirit Casters are now Soulkeepers. Air Magic is now Aerosophy. Basically there's a lot of reworking involved but it has the same core.
So, as time went on and I had developed this world more, I wanted to adapt the original concept of Luna Darkdawn into something that I actually liked. So at some point beteen the ages of 12 and 14 it became Luna Demetori, then I renamed the protagonist as I didn't like the name much (she's named Adeline now), and dropped the prefix. So then it was just Demetori, which was fun and all, but I still needed to write the book in a way I liked. This took another few attempts.
Originally I had two plotlines that connected at the end and two protagonists. Umbra was the co-protagonist and was an orphaned character who used Eastern magic and eventually becomes the main characters best ally. The main character also had an antagonist/friend named Cinder in most of these manuscripts. Originally Cinder was a reincarnated god who lived in the Library the protagonists mother was a part of. Eventually Cinder and Umbra united into being the same character and I dropped the god posession part as I didn't think it fit the story.
The was rewrote yet again, I basically reworked it to be in a first person perspective, then hated it and dropped the book for a year. Until last year when I picked it back up, saw potential in the early part of the story and wrote it from a perspective that made more sense, a character perspective. The protagonist had been abused but never had any consequenses of that, she never changed due to her awful childhood and that was due to me being quite a bad writer in my early years. So I reworked the perspective and once I'd finished the escape ark of the book, I decided to just see where it would go. I sort of planned each arch (there are five in total) and just wrote and rewrote what I didn't like. Some of the original ideas are in there, but very few. It's the same world but how the character interacts with it and how the story unfolds are completely different.
If you read this far, you deserve some kind of treat. Here's a crudely drawn map I did a few years ago when learning Krita.
If you're interested in reading the novel, Demetori is a finished Manuscipt that I have scheduled to post 3 times per week.
