Bloodthirsty woman!

I need to sacrifice a major character at the end of Faerylander to make the book work. 

I told Linda yesterday my plans, expecting her to object (she gets attached to characters), but she simply nodded and said, "I think you're right."

"What if I just really, really wound him?  Take him out of action?"

"No, you have to kill him."

Bloodthirsty woman!

Smooth Transitions:

Seems to me that if the story is going right, if the plot is working, you don't really need many transitions.  The flow is already there.

But if you change the plot as much as I have in Faerylander, a transition here and there can smooth things over even if events don't quite mesh the way they did once.

It's worth the cost to make the story better, though as I say, I'm hoping by the end of the book I won't need very many.

But something I'm noticing in this rewrite -- the transitions I'm writing now are smooth and easy.  They'll need to be tightened up slightly, making sure there isn't any word duplication and so on, but mostly they read well.

Which has made me notice some of the earlier clunky writing.

When I pick up one of my published books and open to any random page, a test of the writing is whether I can read a portion out loud and it feels seamless, smooth.

So part of this last rewrite will be to make the entire book pass that test.  If I was reading this aloud -- or more to the point, if a future professional was reading an audible version of this -- would it pass muster?

No Explanations:

You also don't need a character explaining things.  The story does that.

In the previous iterations of this book, I had at least three different sections where the main character is explaining things.  Or more specifically, trying to convince people to help him by explaining things.

They were the weakest parts of the book.  Slowly, I've managed to replace them with action scenes that do the explaining for me, or making previous developments and motivations clear enough that explanations aren't needed.

I think I pretty much do this automatically now.  But this was my first book, and I was all into explaining things and coming up with what I thought was interesting material (that needed to be explained) instead of letting the story be preeminent.  Hard thing to fix retro-actively.