POV issues

My betas said the first few chapters of the story were kinda bland. So, of course I went back and rewrote it. I think it moves much better now and has more for the reader to latch onto. A lot more of the lore is introduced naturally instead of through extended dialogue now. But that also means I've cut out a bunch of stuff and that has had an unforeseen side effect. My POV is out of whack now.

I feel like my first manuscript was a Jenga tower. It was a little sloppy, but it stood up. Then I decided to pull out some of the blocks from the bottom and, now I'm having to do a lot of small changes to make things fit. This POV problem has arisen because a lot of the stuff I cut out from the original has POV that wasn't Jonathan. That made it natural when a chapter took a break from him to see what others were doing. Since then, he's been in it nonstop and now the older material is coming up fast. Having the first non-Jonathan POV this deep into the story is kinda awkward. It's a huge shift for the reader, I think. Unfortunately, going forward, a lot of these other POVs are important and I can't just swap them out. There's a lot of important stuff happening in The Paladin that isn't directly tied to Jonathan.

So what do I do? At the moment I'm left with two options: 1. I can try to bend the plot in such a way that it wraps more completely around Jonathan, but that will take some major rewriting. Or B. I can go back and add even just one little scene without Jonathan in it. I'm favoring this one, but I'm afraid of doing anything that's going to add to my word count. Of course, if I think about it logically, the heavy rewrites to wrap it around Jonathan more completely will likely also result in a net gain for word count.

Le sigh. I remember in high school when I just wrote. I'd crank out a story every week. I'm not going to say any of those were gems, but man do I miss JUST WRITING. Still, this is the path I chose. I will see it to the end. I hope you guys will stick with me. I promise I'll have something good when it's done.

​Be Excellent To Each Other.