Snowdrop

Bonus Chapter

Aloha! This is just a little extra chapter that delves into some of the behind-the-scenes of Snowdrop, and maybe some little fun facts about the story!

Plot
The original plot of the book stayed more or less the same. Melia and Bailey volunteering, Ember and Haymitch being reaped, Melia getting a not-half-bad score in training, falling for Haymitch slightly, Melia dying and the other three being crowned victor. However, there were some parts that I had to cut completely because they were cliche, carbon-copies of Katniss' story, or just didn't make sense.
Melia, Ember and Bailey were originally supposed to be able to hunt in the woods in a similar way to Katniss' father. And - you guessed it - they were taught to hunt by Melia and Ember's father. Their mentor found out because the other tributes had gone blabbing to their mentors about how amazing they were, and Acacia gave the Alliance similar advice to Haymitch: don't show the others your best skill. For Melia this meant she couldn't use knives, Bailey couldn't go to the archery station, and Ember couldn't use spears. This affected the original training scores, too. From what I can remember, Ember got a ten and Melia and Bailey got eights or nines. Obviously I had to delete this from the revised version because it's so disgustingly similar to Katniss' story and I now cringe every time I read it again.
There was a scene about two days into the Games where the Alliance were attacked by mutts. Of course, because I was twelve when I first wrote it, the Alliance found each other on day 1 and had no problems at all until the dreaded mutts appeared. They were wolf mutts (what a bloody surprise) and Melia was attacked by one and quite badly wounded while Ember stood there screaming for Bailey to kill it. Don't worry, I was so bad at writing that the worst Melia suffered was a mild scrape on the arm, which fed into the Career attack plot point of the new version.
Melia also suffered crudely-written hypothermia, and Ember was forced to haul her, half-unconscious, into a tree and wrap her in plenty of blankets (because of course he got a backpack full of amazing supplies). She was totally fine three days later, while Bailey went out looking for food and passed out in the snow, only to be found by Cellabitch. I changed the way they found Cella so that it fit more with the original canon of Haymitch being saved by someone when he fought the three Careers.
About five days into the Games Melia herself went out to hunt and stumbled across the Careers. She climbed a tree to evade them, stole directly from Katniss and said (very cleverly) "The air's warmer up here, why don't you join me?" then gave one of them a fucking rope to climb up the tree. She was almost strangled, but had a handy knife handily stuffed up her sleeve and handily stabbed the Career in the gut. She was fine.
The romance(ish) between her and Haymitch played out mostly the same, although they ended up almost kissing before Ember stepped in. Ember gave Haymitch a shove, yelled at him a bit, and there were no more consequences. I decided that was too simple, and made it slightly more realistic for Ember's protective-older-brother character, and you know what happened there (Melia never did get her nose sorted. But just imagine Ember screaming "GET REKT" as he punches her in the face).
The death scene also played out similarly, although Melia had her throat slashed and somehow lived long enough for Bailey to 'sing her to sleep'. It was too similar to Rue's death, not to mention completely unrealistic, so I had Melia die a lot quicker and instead, as she died, it was her mother that sang her to sleep. Very sad.

Characters
The characters were unbearable in the original version. Bailey was the wise-cracking best friend (essentially negating Haymitch altogether), Ember was far too sweet, Melia was completely naive but somehow more brutal than her older brother (though she didn't bash in that one tribute's head with a rock), and Cella was at it with the shitty puns all the bloody time, though still a bit devious and deceptive. Haymitch was, well. Haymitch was a teddy bear. Ugh. I can't. I cannot.
I changed Melia to be 'not-quite-right', which is why she was constantly snapping and never truly suffered PTSD after killing the girl from Three. (There was supposed to be a scene where she lost it completely and the Alliance was sent sleep syrup to knock her out before she hurt anyone, but I cut that out because I didn't know where I could fit it.) Ember was still sweet, but had the angry streak of a boy who was forced to grow up far too quickly. Bailey's personality was unfortunately not as developed as I would have liked, but she was the peacemaker of the Alliance, and it was far more obvious earlier on that she had feelings for Ember.
Cella's deceitfulness and cunning were ramped up, which if you recall from the scene where they're watching the reapings, Melia notes that she's smiling slightly. She was always meant to betray the Alliance, although it was a lot more blatant what she was doing in the first version, because it was her that specifically suggested Melia going to the Feast first. I hope that my writing has become a lot more skillful in the last three years so it wasn't immediately obvious.
I also tried to keep Haymitch's sarcastic nature in there. I did keep a line from the original version in there: "Except, sweetheart, you didn't have to agree [to the plan]." I thought he would take Bailey under his wing like an older brother after the death of his family, mostly to protect her somewhat from the Capitol, which is a change from his character in the original version. I don't usually like changing the personality of canon characters, but I just felt Haymitch would always be that sort of 'older brother figure' to anyone who needed it, similar to how he behaved with Katniss.