How I wrote the same novel, twice!

 When I first wrote "Geeky Turn On!" I had zero plans to make any sequels at all. When I finished editing the book and uploaded it to Inkitt, I sighed and said to myself "And that's the end of that." But the desire to see more stories with these characters kept growing and growing, and before I knew it, I HAD to write the sequel! Sadly, when I started putting pen to paper, I had NO IDEA what I was doing!

The story of how I wrote "A Tempted Geek" is in one part hilarious, one part cringe worthy. When I first started, I had one simple idea: tell the story of how Paige and Daisy got engaged and married, told from Paige's point of view. Unfortunately, I had NO IDEA how to properly write a sequel, so the first five chapters of the story were basically a retelling of "Geeky Turn On!" from Paige's point of view. 

This was a mistake; readers who had already read GTO would be bored witless, whilst new readers would be bombarded with information that, to be frank, was largely unnecessary. That was my first mistake.

By the time I began chapter six, I FINALLY got around to making an original story. I felt I needed a villain, so I created a character that would jeopardize Paige and Daisy's relationship. Enter: Vanessa Russo. My idea for her was that she'd be this colossal bitch who'd try to steal Paige away from Daisy. I had my villain, I had my plot, now all that needed to be done was to WRITE!

The story's original title was "Geeky Wedding!" As I said, the original idea was to chronicle the ups and downs that Paige and Daisy had to face as they planned their wedding. But the more I wrote, the more I realized I was moving AWAY from this original idea, and focusing more on the temptation angle. This plot, that of Paige being tempted away from Daisy, utterly fascinated me to the point it took over the whole story. Thus, the original idea was discarded by around chapter 11, when the story was tentatively called "Geeky Temptation!" I wouldn't settle on "A Tempted Geek!" until around chapter 25, maybe 26.

When it came to Vanessa, I originally planned for Daisy to deal with her by hacking into her personal emails and exposing her for fraud, but the more I thought about it, the more I hated the idea. Temptation is a personal conflict, after all, and so I thought that the best way to "beat" Vanessa was for Paige to firmly turn her down and choose to be loyal to Daisy. That was all the victory I originally needed.

But again, "the tale grew with the telling," and I noticed that Paige had more struggles than originally thought. Losing her job, dealing with her insecurities, these were all GREAT plot points that I just came up with on the fly, and so I figured that they needed to be dealt with. Hence why I came up with the five chapters long discussion between Paige and Daisy, where the two really talk out their feelings.

After that, I capped it off with Paige proposing to Daisy, like I originally intended! I finished my novel in ONE month, thus winning my own personal NaNo!

You know the problem with NaNo novels, though? Since you kind of rush them, you're often left with something messy, something you KNOW you could do better if you gave yourself more time. ATG was like that for me for way too long. Even my friend and beta reader agreed, that it deserved to be re-written.

It was December 2021 when I finally said "fuck it," and began fixing ATG. First thing I did was get rid of the needless five chapter recap of GTO, replacing it with a single chapter introducing Paige and Daisy's dynamic. Chapter 2 of this new rewrite wound up being the original chapter 6, and so on. Then it turned out I needed more chapters, and so I wound up writing eighteen more NEW chapters, and rewriting around twenty chapters. 

For all intents and purposes, this was a new book, but it was the same novel. Thus I dubbed it "A Tempted Geek! Definitive Edition" Why? Because this new was the canonical version of events! But, for the sake of curiosity, I kept the original version of the story online. Really made me feel like George Lucas!

And that's the story of how I wrote the same novel, twice! I swore to myself I'd never do that again, but...

That's a story for another time!