Extended Writing Update

I spent a lot of this week absorbing and working on feedback from my one alpha tester (to whom I'm eternally grateful). I've gotten some really excellent notes on things to target for the beta, including:

• General tweaking of initial RO descriptions: I hadn't noticed that I use a lot of the same adjectives when introducing them (e.g. all the women are called "beautiful").

• Reworking the early chapter 8 companion scene to allow for a little more possibility of RO relationship building, and to add in a choice for the MC which companion to spend it with. This was originally meant to be a "get to know one of the 2 characters 'new' to MC" and only involved Rin or Wren. So in the future there'll be a Keo version, too :)

• This wasn't feedback but it's something I want to do pre-beta: Generally rework some of the kiss/intimate scenes. These usually take me a few iterations to get "right" and I want them a degree better than they are now, before I start bringing testers into the mix. I asked a writing mentor of mine for some help with this and they were wonderfully helpful, so I'm looking forward to working on it when the time comes.

There's a bunch more, but those three are the non-spoilery ones ;) Eventually I'm going to make a master post for "planned beta changes," so when the beta releases here you know what to expect.

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Part 2 of this week was me jumping ahead to workshop some of chapter 13, to make sure I was putting everything I needed to into chapters 10-12. I'm glad I did - I realized I was doing too much with the final chapter. There's so much information we get in chapters 9-12 that I've been looking everywhere for places to scale back the narrative.

Lucky me, I found that a huge chunk of exposition in chapter 13 can wait for book 2, and actually gives me a great way to drive the plot forward in early chapters! I'm putting the cart before the horse a little when I say this, but I can't wait to share it with you guys! I'm really excited to be so close to a beta stage and my head's been full of thoughts on how to set up the ending of book 1 well for book 2.

And finally, here's this week's preview:

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Well that's cheery, I think, snorting quietly. What's next - ten plagues and an earthquake?