Edits complete! (mostly) + Reflection

Major edits are complete. A few line edits still need to be made to later chapters, but the bulk of it is done.

Reflection

So, I made a bunch of dev edits. I have a bullet point summary of all of them below, but I highly recommend you go back and read through yourselves (At least the section from 14-25). There are over 20k words of new content, and much of it will be important down the line. 

These edits are the biggest and most important ones that this story needed, but they are not the end. Eventually, I will go back and fix all the other minor issues that still persist, but for now, this is all I’ll be doing. 

Now, I’m sure that some of you are wondering why I bothered to do the dev edits at all, instead of just pressing on and writing book 2 better. First of all, I’m a little bit of a perfectionist. It’s not to the point of me putting the entire story on hold so I can rewrite it from the beginning, but knowing that there is such a glaring flaw in the story, and that I could totally fix it and that I hadn’t fixed it yet was almost painful. It was largely for my own peace of mind.

I also have author premium and on top of the comments and reviews telling me about the flaw, the raw numbers simply were not good after the section I edited. My retention is fantastic through chapter 14, and then falls off a cliff in the chapters following that. I want better retention, because better retention means more readers, which means more money. 

I also don’t like seeing my rating continue to fall like it is, so I’m hoping that at the very least, this will stop that from happening. Most of the negative ratings I get are on that chapter 14-24 section, and I think that the ones that come in the more recent chapters are largely influenced by the experience in that section. Hopefully, by smoothing over the progression and fleshing out the characters, the reading experience is better, and my rating stops falling.

The final and most important reason that I decided to do this is that I have enough backlog I can afford to. The effect that these chapters have had on my release schedule is almost 0. I can put out these edits while still maintaining the same steady stream of new content. If I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t have bothered.

Some of you are probably also wondering how I screwed up so badly. By most accounts, my first 9 chapters are great, and the next few are a reasonable continuation of them. So how did I screw up the dwarf arc so badly after nailing the first arc so well? The short answer is: I’m stupid. 

The long answer is that it was a combination of a few factors. First, as much as I thought using the rotational cipher for foreign languages was cool, it was also kind of tedious. I wasn’t translating by hand, but still, copying the dialogue into the cipher, and copying the output out was mildly annoying. More importantly, I was worried that the readers wouldn’t like it. It’s an interesting way to represent foreign languages, but I’d imagine reading blocks of gibberish dialogue gets old pretty quickly. So I wanted to skip through the language learning process.

The second factor was my vague plan for Elise’s progression. I didn’t want her to evolve again until the end of the book. If she was just chilling in the dwarven kingdom farming experience points from their monster caves, she’d probably level up a bunch, and that would make it more difficult to justify her not evolving sooner. So, I decided that she wasn’t going to level up. 

The third reason was that I also had a vague plan for the dwarf v drow war setup, and I wanted to get to it sooner. I was excited to start that section, and wanted to skip over all the lead up. 

There were a few other factors, but those 3 combined into me making one of the worst decisions I possibly could have made for the story, which was time skipping 3 months and cutting out all meaningful progression. I didn’t realize how bad it was to have 40k words with no level-ups until that section started on Royal Road and I realized “Oh shit, I have 40k words with no level-ups,” and by then Patreon was well beyond that point, so it was too late to fix. Too late to fix without a hiatus, at least, and I didn’t want to do that (I still don’t).

After realizing that, I started thinking about how I would fix it. Originally, I was just going to go straight to Amazon, and fix it there, but as the story kept growing, and the follower bleed got worse and worse, I realized that I needed to fix it sooner than later. I hired a friend to do some dev edits (it’s Extra26, author of Magus Reborn. Go check his stuff out, he’s great), and he gave me a lot of great feedback and some recommendations on how to fix it, and as soon as I had that feedback, I started working on these new chapters. 

The last thing you’re probably all wondering is why I bothered to do the dwarf-drow arc in the first place. It didn’t really relate to the first part of the series, and I do admit, it does feel kind of out-of-place. The answer to that is… I don’t know. I don’t plan. I just write. 

I got Elise underground and had no idea where to go. I needed something interesting for her to do, and I had just been rereading The Hobbit, so I introduced the dwarves on a whim. I needed something interesting to happen to her in the dwarf city, so I added the drow. Were those mistakes? I have no idea. Maybe if I had taken the story a different direction, it would have been better. Maybe it would have been worse. Who knows? 

Whatever the case, it no longer matters. I wrote what I wrote, and now I’m doing my best to make it as good as possible. The story is locked on its current path, and this arc will need to be resolved before I can move onto the next one, and I’m not going to half-ass it just to get past it. 

I make no promises for what kinds of plots I’m going to write in the future. I know what the arc after this is going to be because I already started writing it, but after that, I really have no idea where the story is going to go. As I said before, I don’t plan. The only plans that exist for this story are plans for what Elise’s evolutions are going to be, and a few vague ideas of character arcs. 

I will, however, commit to making sure that the progression stays smooth, and that I’ll do my best to never put Elise in a situation where sitting around and doing nothing for 3 months is something that is a good idea. That’s really not what I meant to happen here, but as I explained before, I made some pretty dumb mistakes. I will commit to, at the very least, not doing that again. 

There are a few things that I want to make clear though. Everything won’t be sunshine and rainbows after this arc is over. Elise will not be going into the woods to grind levels for 50 chapters. I will introduce more side characters, and they will be important for the story. I have no desire to make this a story about a solo MC who avoids everyone else in pursuit of strength. I have no desire to make a story where Elise is the only important character. If you’re looking for something like that, read something else. 

I cranked out 20k words of these edits in about 4 days, then realized that I introduced a massive plot hole, spent a couple days thinking how to fix it, then ended up cutting about 15k of those words and writing 13k new ones. I spent a lot longer than I probably should have, but I think it turned out alright. It's not perfect, and as I wrote, I realized that there were a lot of other things I should have done, but with the story already locked into its long-term route, I was limited in what I was able to change without destroying the rest of the book.

Patch notes: 

Existing chapters:

15 - Preparation

• Now chapter 20

• time skip is only 1 month now.

• Content from the new chapters (practicing with Sindri, mana cultivation) is mentioned

• New worldbuilding done (the Jungle)

• Josef appears while Elise is looking at the maps

• Baldur and Jonas have some lines now, in accordance with their existing characterization

• Meeting with Hallbjorn happens on the same day now, instead of the next morning.

16 - Departure

• Now chapter 21

• General alterations to align with new content

• Elise tells Hallbjorn she's planning to leave, and it is clear that Hallbjorn is willing to assist her if needed

• Jonas and Baldur's lines slightly altered to match new characterization

17 - Interrogation

• Now chapter 22

• Elise's thoughts on the alarm altered to fit new situation

• Drow break-in moved to castle, instead of city outskirts

• Explain Elise's reasoning for agreeing to the fake imprisonment better (not forced. She was curious)

• Altered conversation with Marie and Claudia to reflect their goals for breaking into the castle. Also made Elise more intelligent about her interrogation

• Marie and Claudia are now more French

18 - Council

• Now chapter 23

• Completely rewritten. Please read the whole chapter

• Council debate is more rational. Less yelling, more legitimate points

• No wasting time on debating what to do with Elise. All business about what to do about the drow prophecy

• Introduced option of the dwarves marching on the drow in response to learning of the prophecy

• Introduce more conflict on which choice to choose from Hallbjorn

• Moved second conversation with drow to this chapter (from Escape). Included Hallbjorn in the conversation directly

• More uncertainty on whether the plan would work or not

• Drow are once again more French

• Josef is still a prick, but he's more subservient to the king now

• The plan for getting the drow out of the city is explained, as well as the reasoning behind it

19 - Escape

• Largely rewritten, though the sequence of events is almost identical

• Conversation with drow removed from beginning (because it was moved to the previous chapter

• More guards on the wagon

• The vigilantes have names now. The main one has a past with Snorri, the one driving the wagon

• Snorri is less cowardly

• The plan goes wrong in a different way

20 - Farewell

• Matched inner monologue and narration to new content in previous edits

• Altered Elise's mental recovery from Greta's words to better align with edits. Her motivation for helping the dwarves is much clearer now.

• Altered final conversation in light of previous edits

New chapters:

• Chapter 15: Elise negotiates with Hallbjorn. They come to terms on a mutually beneficial deal that keeps Elise in Dokkalfheimr, but not as a prisoner. Elise thinks a lot about Sophie and co, but decides that it’s best not to go see them yet. Greta is introduced

• Chapter 16: Elise has her first lesson with Greta. She meets Josef. Then, she goes to the training grounds where she starts her first lesson with Sindri

• Chapter 17: The lesson with Sindri finishes (with some help from Jens), and then Elise does some more training on her own. A form of mana cultivation (kind of but not really) is introduced

• Chapter 18: Elise has a nightmare about the night of the warg attack. She has another lesson with Greta. She has another lesson with Sindri. She eats dinner with Hallbjorn. More of Hallbjorn’s backstory with his wife, son, and the drow is revealed.

• Chapter 19: Elise can speak Dwarvish now (kind of). She has another lesson with Greta, and learns about the history of the Rune of Fate. She has another lesson with Sindri, who shares more information about Runes. Elise ponders the Rune of Fate.

Important points not to miss

• It is now much more obvious that Elise’s stay in Dokkalfheimr was voluntary. She also has much more agency, and is actively working to get stronger

• The dwarves really want to leave, but the drow don’t want them to, and actively stop them whenever they try.

• The Rune of Fate is super duper important, and also you can probably channel mana through it somehow

• Sindri is very strong and very strange

• Elise wants to help the dwarves because she feels bad about sitting by and doing nothing while the warg killed the Grays, and she doesn’t want to feel similarly if war breaks out and she knows she might have been able to stop it
  

Overall, I think these changes should have a very positive impact on the flow of the story, the feel of the progression, and also the readers’ perception of the dwarves. I didn’t want the dwarves to be universally loved or anything, but the dwarf hate got much higher than I intended it to, and hopefully, this should help flesh out the dwarves as people, and as a species. 

These changes should also make the ending of the book much more satisfying, as it adds some foreshadowing and build-up to some of the later events in the story.

I'll be slowly adding the line edits to the later chapters for a little longer tonight, and then I'll pick up where I left off in the morning. Tomorrow evening, I will push all these changes to Royal Road, so if you want a better reading experience to re-read them, you should wait until then.

Thank you all for reading. I hope you enjoy both the new edits, and the upcoming content for the future of the story.