In this bout of revision, I added some physical actions in the form of “exercises.” Heroine went through a lengthy convalescence followed by months of relative peace in the marsh and isn’t in her peak physical form. As soon as she admits she won’t be able to fade into the background and evade what’s coming, she’d be working on her conditioning—general strength, fine motor control, muscle memory she hasn’t had occasion to call upon for a while—so she’ll get her ass kicked less.
I’m not going full Training Montage (cue “Eye of the Tiger”), but a lot of her empty fidgets during conversations can be replaced with fidgets that make sense.
I changed some dialogue, and Hero ended up saying he’d do XYZ “with the utmost discretion.” A while later, I remembered how XYZ actually unfolds, and “with the utmost discretion” became the funniest thing I’ve heard all month.
We briefly meet a character I adore because he is the roguiest of RPG rogues, vain and irreverent and daring and visibly weary with a traumatic backstory and a heart of gold. I added a paragraph break and otherwise left the perfection of his presence untouched.
Heroine not knowing the name of the cursed city they’re returning to became awkward. The kingdom is the subject of a myth. Think about how much you know about, say, Camelot or Mount Olympus just from casual media exposure. I can easily include a handful of words about the capital the first time the kingdom is mentioned, and the ready knowledge will “prove” the well-tread status of the story in their world.
Dithering over one sentence prompted me to add a chapter to Roasting Chestnuts regarding so-called “floating eyeball syndrome.” After venting my spleen about terminally literal pedants who complain when writers fail to perpetually specify that body parts are attached to a body controlled by a sentient being, my resolve settled like a fire-smothering blanket.
The sentence is fine as-is.[efn_note]Terminally literal pedants are entitled to engage with books however they please! I’m simply encouraging writers to write for an audience that presumes attachment of body parts and requires specification only when differing from the norm rather than for an audience that applies itself to deliberately misinterpreting autonomy when every movement isn’t explicitly attributed to Sentient Being as Subject of Every Sentence.[/efn_note]
During the last revision pass, some great wit (me) decided to rearrange the order of some late Act 2 events. Needed to be done, story’s better for it, great. Except the same great wit (me) plunked the later event into its new time slot and said, “I’ll fix it later!”
Well, it’s later, and Past Me can choke on a bag of breadsticks for leaving me a high heap of new transitional writing on both ends. Change of setting means descriptions have to be rewritten, and all the previous action that made use of the environment has to be replaced. Most of the dialogue was salvageable. Otherwise, three scenes had to be written from scratch.
Totally understand why Past Me didn’t want to do all that! But girl, please, pick a quarter of the burden and spare Future Me a teeny bit of suffering.
Not Revision
I made PDF excerpts for my books so I could use the “preview” function on Payhip. Then I thought, “Wow, that would be so much better than the difficult-to-exit-once-opened excerpts I recently put inside spoiler envelopes on my site.” So now the site excerpts open PDFs in browser! Behold the Grave Oversight page for an example.
I formatted the PDFs to be paperback-narrow, but I thought about mobile only after I was done with the whole project. A belated check reveals they’re a little tight to read upright on a phone screen but not so bad I’m compelled to remake them immediately. Future files will have an aspect ratio that’s friendlier for phone folk.
