Meredith Mansfield, Author

Oops. Got busy on my revisions yesterday and forgot to blog.

I’m in the middle of the (hopefully) next-to-last revisions on THE BARD’S GIFT, based on feedback from readers. This will take probably two passes and then it will be time for the final polishing edit. The last couple of days I’ve had two particular issues in my revisions.

One chapter involved sailing and a storm. Well, I’ve never been in a wooden boat during a storm. In fact, I haven’t often been on a boat because, well, because I get sea sick so it’s not much fun. So, I asked for someone on one of my writer’s forums to read those sections and let me know what I’d gotten wrong. The feedback was very helpful, but it takes a lot of work to incorporate some of those suggestions.

Deep breath and move on to the next chapter, which was boring. Boring. Well, the problem with this chapter was not that nothing happened. It was that a large part of the chapter as originally written was wrapped up in the characters getting from point A to point B. A couple of things that will be important later happened, but they were buried in the travelogue.

Note to self: This story doesn’t take place in Middle Earth and I’m not J. R. R. Tolkien.

Hopefully, I’ve fixed that by deleting a lot of stuff that didn’t move the story along and substituting a little character development. It’s possible that development will get deleted in the next pass, too.