I realized what was bugging me about the draft as it existed. The basic premise involves the people who own property on Crystal Lake, and go untouched while Jason slaughters everybody else who comes to visit the place. What kind of culpability issues are involved? Do they even care what's happening? And if not, why not? Does Crystal Lake exude some kind of corrupting effect? So it really started out as an anti-Friday the 13th story, because instead of following nubile teens, I followed a nice old lady who wanted some nice lake property that was for sale *remarkably* cheap. And it was working pretty well. The problem came once the nubile teens showed up. I wanted to develop them a little, give each of them a plotline, and I also wanted the kills to be F13-worthy. All of this meant time away from the main thing I wanted to explore, and time away from my main character, who was the most interesting one, even if she wasn't typical F13 material. It just turned into a typical "pretty people get slaughtered" movie, and while those are fun, I didn't enjoy it as much as I had the earlier stuff. So now I'm trying to get back to that.
The good news is that since I've got it mostly written, I've already figured out what the sequence of events is. So now I just have to transfer the focus more to my main character's POV of events, which means that all but a few of the characters get a lot less screen time. This isn't a huge loss, for the most part, but one of the victims wound up really surprising me, and I'd hate to lose her part. So that'll take some rethinking.
