Read Through

This week, I read our novel, from one end to the other.

Things I noticed that I would like to change:

Word Usage:

faint, faintly - There's an over-fondness for this word, on both my part and Liz's. I'm pretty sure there are other words which mean the same thing.

other adverbs and adjectives - It seems that there are a few too many descriptive words. These should be trimmed a bit

eyes, smile, look, laughed, blush - these words show up a lot, too

Consistency:

Simone's hair color changes at least once that I noticed. Most of the time it's dark blonde, but at least once it was described as being brown

Cities and countries. On several occassions (as we still don't have anything remotely resembling a world map) cities and countries were just made up to fill a name-slot. The hired mercenaries have at least 2 different country-named homes. Also, in the bit just before Alarik shows up, Floristahn and Kristlestahn get their names switched in a few places

a few places in the story need to be polished up to match - the difficulty of writing things out of order is sometimes details get a bit muddled. There's an argument between Alarik and Simone just before Monika arrives that's... dreadfully inconsistant with the last several arguments they've had before.

Harrik's language - somewhere near the end of writing, Harrik developed this speech quirk, using slightly archaic words like ye and nae. I like this, but I need to go back and apply it to all of his dialogue.

Seamist - Liz wants all the elf-descriptions to match. In a few places where I wrote about the elf, the descriptions are slightly different.

In the Trial for Marshal Sorvech, there's a bit of a jump in logic on the Kronig's part about something Heidel says which should be smoothed out.

Oh, and Brunklaus's name and title need to be checked for consistancy. Sometimes he's Brunklaust. And sometimes he's the Patriarch, and sometimes the Arch-Partriarch.

Details:

Deshi's mother's name needs to be changed. Originally she was a captured slave, Khadyian in descent, and her name is Sanya, a Khadyian name. This should be altered to reflect her changed history, and her name should be Karandi instead

Fondness for D, K, V, and B names. there are soooo many sub characters whose names start with these four letters, either last names or first names. Some of them need to get new names. These people don't matter much, but I don't want to confuse the hell out of everyone.

Foriegn made up words - also need to be examined, particular in my sections. Liz already had a good deal of Alani worked out before we started, but I did not have any languages worked out, so I often just sort of made up a word when it was needed. This led to the Khaydian word for hunter and the dwarven word for human being almost exactly the same word. Not only that, I recognize where it came from. I simply mixed up the syllables for an EQ city name, Kael Drakkel. I should fix this.

Story:

Ok, this may sound really arrogant, but thus far, I haven't really found any issues with the story itself.

Decisions:

We still need to decide about the sex. Does it stay in (in which case, a few more scenes will need to be added where we faded to black) or does it come out (in which case, several scenes will need to be removed and faded to black) or does it get softened up a lot (since most of them were written as erotic short stories at first, and are... a bit graphic. In which case, several of them will need to be rewritten).

Which further reminds me that if it does come out, there's a chapter in Part one that will either need to be padded up (since there's really only two scenes in there, and one of them is a sex scene) or merged.

OH! And title: We were in the bookstore the other day and found Margaret Weis's new book Brothers in Arms on the shelves. BAH! My current suggestions for new titles are Circle in the Sand (which really only applies to Part One, but so what? And changing Part One's name to Bag of Rocks) and Hammer and Rose which is actually backwards, since the rose part comes before the Hammer part, but Rose and Hammer doesn't sound as good.

An additional thought: should we include a glossary/index sort of thing to define foreign words and an index of characters, since there are an awful lot of them. I hesitate, since some of these could be considered spoilers: Such as, how does one index Valleria Lorian? She's Diya and Loria's daughter, the child of the circle, but by saying that, it ruins the suspense of "will Diya manage to win his suit with Kevil and Loria?" I know that happened to me when I was reading the Dragonriders of Pern series... midway through book one, I knew that Jaxom was going to impress a dragon.

Anyway, just some random thoughts.

Work done:

Read through (15 hours)
Editting (2.5 hours) (I know we said we weren't editting this before January, but I was so disgusted with the universe a few days ago that I needed something to distract me and settled on editting.)

Posted by tisfan at December 09, 2002 11:59 AM