As I've written Too Much Love and come to understand better the roles I wanted various characters to play, several of them have gotten older or younger from chapter to chapter. Sometimes this was deliberate, but more often I just forgot that I'd set an age for a character in an earlier chapter, then reset it in a later one.
In many cases, this isn't story-critical. Connie Carlisle is in her early forties, but which early forty doesn't really change her role. Kiki was nineteen at the start of the story and had a birthday, but I might want to rewrite her as twenty-one just to make room for all the life she's already led. I think Pilar started out as twenty-five, but when I realized that her crucible should be the duration of her time as Nick's primary relationship, I bumped her up to twenty-eight and her cousin Inez from twenty-eight to thirty.
Other ages have to be set in stone (really hard to avoid puns here. Maybe next time, I'll write about the Abromawitz family.) Nick's eighteenth birthday sets the whole story in motion and all of his closest friends are also eighteen. Jesse is twenty-one and Threnody twenty-five because he needs to have been fifteen when she was eighteen.
Some ages are consequential, but not critical. Some are triggers to other events, like Nick turning eighteen. I have one character in particular whose age is both consequential and a trigger to future events. And when I realigned some major events in order to give Too Much Love an actual ending to strive for, that pushed part of her storyline into the future. That character is Verity Ferrari-Stone, Threnody's little sister.
In chapter 46, Verity is sixteen, going on seventeen. When she arrives in New York around chapter 57, she's seventeen and about to be eighteen, which doesn't work unless everyone else was traveling at close to the speed of light in the intervening two months. For a lot of this sort of shifting, I make a note to myself that the chapters will need reconciling in any future rewrite and leave it as is. My experience is that if I use every breaking change as an excuse to do a rewrite, I never finish anything.
But in Verity's case it matters. I need her to turn eigtheen in September of 2016 instead of September 2015 or Things Just Don't Work. And because I just got through posting many of the chapters in which it's mentioned that she's seventeen and about to be eighteen, leaving them there is visible and ugly.
But, on the other side, there's a material difference in Nick, who is a legal adult, kissing his (distant) cousin who is about to be eighteen on the dance floor versus kissing that same cousin when she is still sixteen. Or at least it feels different to me, the person who wrote about it.
So, I'm putting chapters 58-66 up on skids and reworking whatever bits revolve around Verity's age. Verity will go back to being the sweet, innocent, scheming, manipulative, cousin-kissing sixteen year old she was originally meant to be. I apologize if this change weirds anyone out.