Alternate Takes: Chapter 4, Page 11 (Patreon)

Rewrites are a fact of life here at Camp D&W, but when we mess with a page, it's usually for punch-ups or continuity purposes; the "skeleton" of the scene stays intact.

Today's page, however, was a bit of a special case - in the main because it was first conceived for Dan's OTT bender in the latter half of Chapter 3, and revolved around him blitzed out of his ever-loving mind on a Vitaly Special. (There's a little nub of that scene left in the finished chapter - specifically, the part when Dan gripes about those 'counterfeit sleeping pills'.)

Pushing it out to Chapter 4 to fill out our Awful Dayjob Quota meant some tactical re-writes were needed, but I didn't really have an angle to work with; for several weeks, it just sat there as a "INSERT SHITTY DELIVERY HERE" placeholder before I finally buckled in and came up with the above. It wasn't great, but y'know, it worked. Sorta.

About a week before the page was due to run, Claire chimed in, pointed out (correctly) that we'd already done the whole "Dan meets pissed-off customer" schtick way back in Chapter 1, and urged another re-write to make the whole shebang "less filler-y". In the end, she ended up writing the page herself, I snuck in to do the usual dialogue clean-up, and the rest is history.