d2/[4 of 40] 112,229 words

I have completed revisions on the first 4 Nick chapters. I feel good about this so far, but it is hard to do all this cutting and tweaking. It seems like things constantly come up I want to check or revise. I’ll do two more Nick chapters next so that I stay with his sequence and follow his arc, then I’ll go start Evaya and catch her up to where the meet. My new length goal is 100K words, which means a lot more cutting… about 10% chapter by chapter.

In my notes for the chapter changes, I also mapped out where they all should be in their arcs, and noted if I need a scene to emphasize this. I’ll incorporate all this during my pass through the text.

I connected with Skylark over on a fantasy writing forum and we have started workshopping each other’s novels. She has an interesting story that I am enjoying critiquing. She has also provided me some critical outside-reader feedback that I never anticipated. Two things in particular he said was that the secrecy of Spawn operations in the Citadel is unclear… and she is 100% right. The answer is that Spawns should be public figures for military/state uses, but totally clandestine for his ‘personal projects’. However, I was not expressing this in the chapters at all. The other thing is that she thinks I have overemphasized Nick’s guilt, and that as a reader, she can sympathize with how he must be feeling. Also a very useful point. I might be trying to hard to shove the sensations down the reader’s throat, instead of trusting to the picture I am painting to invoke the feelings naturally. It is hard to share stuff with other people, but there is no denying the feedback is crucial to improving the story. Thanks Skylark!

On that front, nothing from Mark Lawrence on his site. Didn’t expect anything, but I would have loved the chance. Ah well.