Soon, I stopped 'production' of the third season midway through so that I could retype and refine the first 2 seasons (around the fall of 2001). This became a major task, as I wanted to offer small hints of what was to happen in the future in the early seasons (since I had a rough idea of what was going to happen throughout the series), and I wanted to further develop the relationships and personalities of the characters that hadn't really appeared in the original, page-long synopsis I did of each episode. Soon the episodes expanded to about a page and a half in the early episodes of the first season to about 3 pages towards the end of the second. By the time I had finished with the second season (the Spring of 2002), I realized that the show needed major revamping in the first season again, to match the tone of the second season and to better fit what I wanted to do with the series during the 8 season run I had planned for it.
I briefly toyed with reordering the first season, but decided to keep the original episode order, even though a large group of the early episodes are heavy set-up episodes (episodes 1-3, 5-7) and require patience before the more action/heavy dramatic conflict episodes began to appear (episodes 8-22). Seeing as how most episodes were only 1-2 pages, I felt that it would not be as hard to get through the establishment of the characters. Plus, with the current rewrite, I could add some action previously missing from the early episodes.
As the rewrites continue (and continue), the characters begin to change and expand (and in a few cases, diminish) to better suit a larger narrative. The character of River Cox (originally River Vasill), has seen much more development in her earlier episodes. Kathryn Cortes has also seen her character become much more full through the rewrites. In earlier writings, she (and Justin and Kevin) often took a backseat to the larger storylines involving Robert, Sharon, Rick, Danielle, and the villians Persia and Lillian. Michael and Mylissa, whom often were just 'the couple' are both coming into their own as characters also.
The character who has gone through the largest change is Vanessa Ericson (the original character name was Melinda Montaque), who was a shy, soft-spoken character in my original writings. She has since become a bit of a bitch (the lovable type) in my later writings. In fact, she was part of the reason I decided to redo the entire first season, as her character in the second season became much more prominent, but lacked the backstory of the other characters despite being around since the first episode!
Another thing that has changed with almost every rewrite has been the 'casting' of the characters. The original casting has Keith Smith as Robert, Nick Covill as Rick, Yvette Ramon as Kathryn, Chris Trinidad as Kevin, Lydia Avery as Sharon, Brittni Cochran as Mylissa, Travis Gould as Michael, Jessica Zinsmeister as Melinda (later Vanessa), Jonathan Rhoades as Justin, and Danielle Burnsides as Danielle. All of these people have since been dropped, with the exception of Nick Covill, Jonathan Rhoades, and Danielle Burnsides, although Lydia Avery and Travis Gould are both being used as other characters (Lydia in the much more prominent role of Vanessa).
UPDATE: Cast list is changing even more. I swear, I settle on one eventually.
Some wonder why I have pictures of my characters (often using friends), and my simple reason is: It helps you picture what the character looks like and saves me time when it comes to descibing the character, since I can skip superficial characteristics. Also, it gets my friends who would otherwise just smile and nod when I ask them to read to actually look through it to see what 'their' character does. This had made getting critiques much easier.
With this new batch of rewrites (starting in the Summer of 2008, after a hiatus that started in the Spring of 2003), the cast will once again change from its current grouping as I incorporate friends from college into it, so I can once again bully them into critiquing under the guise of "What do you think of your character?" Hopefully, the show will continue to grow and expand from its current incarnation into an even better one, completely independent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although I will offer tidbits of it's ancestry in my rewrites for those happy few who have stayed with this show for it's somewhat long run. Enjoy the show!