Meredith Mansfield, Author

Remember THE IGNORED PROPHECY is at its heart a mystery.

Strange things are happening with Vatar’s magic for more than one reason. The story starts with this and ends when the last part of the mystery is finally unraveled.

The main problem with the first part of the book as it’s written, is that after the mystery starts, the characters do a lot of talking about it. To a degree, this is necessary. Each of them has part of the key to getting to the bottom of it. They have to talk it out in order to solve the mystery. But . . . well, it’s not exactly epic. In fact, I can see where some readers thought that section was pretty slow.

The plan to correct this goes like this:

1. One part of the mystery was resolved much too quickly in the last draft. I’m going to put that off now. The characters will actually propose the (correct) solution and then discard it until much later.
2. There’s enough action (I think) in the first three chapters that essentially expose the mystery, but then not much (as currently written) until the first major plot point in Chapters 12 and 13. (No, I’m not going to tell you what that is.) To correct this:
   1. I’m going to expand a minor (but important) incident in Chapter 7 and make it much more exciting. Hopefully, it will also serve to increase Vatar’s level of fear about what’s going on. (I actually wrote this scene yesterday.)
   2. In Chapter 9, where Vatar relates a part of what happened in THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, I’m going to add a few mini-flashbacks of the more exciting parts.Then, well things start getting really interesting around about Chapter 12.
   3. And Chapter 10, which mostly just serves to set up Chapter 12 and to account for the unexpected arrival of another character . . . well, I’m getting out the pruning axe for that chapter.