Letter from the Editor

Just got my line edit back from the editor (Josiah Davis), and he sent this with the material. Thought you guys might like to take a look, just as a special interest kind of thing.

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First off, awesome work with the dev edit. As a whole the book was so much clearer this time around. Hopefully it didn't take too-extensive rewrites to make that happen, but the parts where I could tell you added in just a few more clarifying sentences really landed much better. Great job on that.

In regards to the line edit, the comments will be pretty similar to the last time. Main thing I want to express is just avoiding the overuse of certain elements in writing. First would be adverbs. You have a tendency after a dialogue tag to do "he said (adverbly)," that sort of thing. That construction is totally fine, but not if you're doing it multiple lines in a row. And then it makes it especially glaring if you wind up throwing in another adverb at another point, because then it just becomes a stream of adverbs. Try to only use 1-2 per paragraph. That way you're not relying on them too heavily.

Same would go for when you're using parentheticals/asides in the narration. That's definitely part of your writing voice, so I can see it's intentional, but there's times you do it just a bit too heavily and it makes the writing/information a bit stilted, like you're taking too long to get to the point of what you're trying to say. I commented on the times it was excessive, just keep it in mind in the future.

Be careful with pronoun capitalization consistency in the final chapter. When you have Xhinn take over Xyn's body, you start out by capitalizing the pronouns, but then you stop. Not sure if that was intentional, definitely didn't read that way, but just be sure the pronouns in that chapter specifically are consistent.

Besides that, just the normal sort of comments throughout. Book was pretty free of typos, so great work with that. I just have various rephrasings/clarifying bits put in in the comments. Make sure to let me know if you have any questions on any of the comments. Really good job on this, and thanks for the continued chance to work together, this was an incredibly fun book to go through.