Being coy with your plot.

I've exposed Led to the Slaughter to some new critiquers and they have some very valid suggestions.

I'm not willing to reshape the structure of the book at this time, but word choice and such are very helpful.

The thing about making structurally changes this late in a working book is that once you take out one piece of the puzzle, the whole thing can fall apart.  It can become a real nightmare to put it back together.  It may seem like a small change, but it may be something that the rest of the book hinges on.

I like the basic plot, the characters, and the mood of this book -- it is one of the first times I've felt like I've gotten all three elements right.  There is always room for improvement in the writing, though there comes a point when you should stop fiddling.

It was a conscious choice not to try to play games with the plot.

One suggestion that most of the readers have made -- and have from the very beginning of the book -- is that I slowly reveal the wolves, do a long tease, keep up the mystery.

I totally get that.  But I find that my writing works much better if I go ahead and explain things as I go along.  That doesn't mean the characters of the book know what's going on, but the reader will often be ahead of them.  It's a neat technique, but I'm not totally comfortable with it.

I tried to so that with Faerylander, and it just didn't work.  I went back and but in the villians point of view right from the beginning, and suddenly everything worked.

Trying to be coy entails a lot of -- "For the first time he realized..." kind of passages, which to me can be kind of annoying.

Anyway -- I feel the the rewriting is improving the book in a thousand small places -- incrementally but added up it makes for a better read.

It adds, in my opinion, about 5% to the overall quality to give it a real solid polish.  Which isn't a small number, because you add it to the existing material. 

Sure, I've totally made up that percentage -- but it feels right.  :)