DT2 - Final Edits

We're pretty much at the end of the Patreon chapters, and I'm making one last round of edits to try to fix some pacing issues. This book has ended up spiraling away from the "quick and easy" book I wanted to pump out, but let's not go into that.

I won't detail a lot of the minor changes here, such as Graem being more antagonistic toward Rys in Mave's PoV chapter, Maria showing up a little more, or some adjusted lines from Mina and Fara. This is about the broader strokes.

General Pacing Changes

The pacing of the Patreon chapters is pretty off. There are around 90k words, in a 140k word book. The structural midpoint happens close to 70% of the way into the story, with the Battle of Lapisloch, and the end of Act 2 happens not long after. That's some very rough pacing.

I've tried not to think too hard about the three act structure with this book, because the nature of Demon's Throne sometimes made it hard. But the massive lull in action between the visit to the Labyrinth and the Battle of Lapisloch hurts the book too much. You've seen a couple of my attempts to fix this (the Fara PoV chapter and the assassination attempt), but I'm not keen on them.

The reason this ended up happening is because Avolar is the fulcrum of the narrative, but the Malus League are the real enemy. So until the League actually does something, the story sort of blunders along. There's also some Act 3 issues that you can't see, but mostly involve introducing new characters (it's generally bad practice to introduce a new character that late, even if they've been brought up previously).

So, the way to fix this pacing turns out to be simpler than I thought. At least once I gave myself some time to just think about it, although the changes are a little painful.

The League needs to play a bigger role sooner. The Battle of Lapisloch becomes the end of Act 2 (it's a fairly dramatic event, after all). Act 3 remains largely unchanged, but I can shift the timing of certain events and introductions to make it less jarring.

Act 1 Changes

This covers up to Chapter 14, roughly.

The overall pacing of the act won't change, despite my misgivings. I'm moving some events around and giving the Ruathym events more time to breath.

The requirement to explain a few things that I left out of Book 1, plus the summoning powerup being a prerequisite for Rys to do a bunch of things later, make this a difficult act to shift around. There have been lots of little changes already.

Act 2 Changes

This is the part that needs to be fixed. Right now, it's just an entire act of character development and building up Rys's kingdom. That still needs to happen, but the plot needs to be focused a little more.

Part of what makes this act so big is that I tend to write long interaction scenes, that wind together. While I'll break up a couple of chapters to make the passage of time less jarring, the opposite can be worse. There is a 13k word talking segment that takes place over the course of a few hours (summoning the succubi, through to talking to Darus). That's like a quarter of some books in the genre.

Anyway, the main change here will be that I'll move a few chapters from the end of the act to roughly the middle. You haven't seen these chapters, as they currently take place right after the Battle of Lapisloch.

By moving them, I'll introduce the Malus League into the plot proper earlier, along with a certain character, and add some action during the length slow period.

The cost of doing this is that I need to do a lot of editing to ensure continuity. I could probably get away without doing this, but given I've already taken this long to write the book, I may as well spend an extra day or three to get it right.

Point-of-View Scenes

The final aspect of the book I'm uncertain of are the relative abundance of PoV changes to female characters. They're a contentious topic for a bunch of reasons I really don't care to go into. I use them because they're invaluable to capturing a broader picture of the story, as well as the MC's impact on the world.

That's especially important in Demon's Throne, given Rys spends so much time in his palace.

The final count of PoV scenes (as planned) is: 2 or 3 Mave scenes (she likely needs one before the Battle of Lapisloch, but I don't know if I'll cut her Act 3 scene); 1 Fara; 1 Mina; 1 Vallis. In the final version, I expect 3 of these to take place within 10 chapters of one another.

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Anyway, that's a general overview of what's changing. You'll find that the book itself will be a fair bit different to the Patreon version, but still largely similar.

As mentioned above, the book has been a challenge. A few occurrences have suggested that I need to rely more on my own feel for the book, which is difficult when I haven't had to do that for quite a while. We'll see if I'm right about that.