okay aya what did your beta readers tell you?

two blog posts in one day? good grief!

yeah, well.

i don’t know how i’m supposed to explain this to someone who hasn’t read my book but here goes. the big, agreed-upon points that people made, positive and negative:

• the writing was beautiful, the book was readable and compelling

• the soft magic system of true names needs to be made more explicit

• related to the second point, the motivations of the main character were sometimes unclear (because of confusion about the magic)

• the motivations of other characters could also be more explicit, and brought forth sooner

• the opening section is too long; it needs more tension, sooner

• the main reveal was interesting

• the narrative structure and voice worked, but there are a few places where it gets too confusing; the places where it changes POV could be made more clear.

• it’s not clear which of the antagonists is the “big bad,” it seems there are two somewhat diverging subplots that could converge, but don’t.

• the hard magic system is cool

• one of the subplots can be removed entirely

• another subplot could start earlier, it contributes more than i realized

people disagreed about a few things i didn’t expect:

• some people read this as a Fantasy Romance. others (correctly, by my intentions) assessed it as a subversion of the Fantasy Romance genre

• relatedly, some people felt that my Love Interest did not need redeeming; some thought he needed redeeming and managed it; some thought he needed redeeming but did not manage it and even feared the book might be condoning his Bad Behavior (tm)

• a couple of people didn’t care for the love-triangle or its tertiary member. other people preferred its tertiary member as a love interest. someone else liked the tertiary member better than my two primary characters and thought he was better off without either of them.

it may not surprise you to learn that this second set of bullet points is where my interest lies. plot points, magic mechanics, whatever — i can fix that shit.

i’m not entirely sure what to do with the fact that some people read my book very differently. probably making the soft magic system and everyone’s motivation clearer will help. but one of the most surprising things about this experience was learning that someone might interpret my book differently than i intended.

i mean, i knew that could happen, but i thought i’d done a reasonable job of making it clear what i meant. apparently i have further to go than i realized in that regard.

so, what happens now?

okay, so hear me out — but right now the answer is nothing.

i wanted to hit the ground running in December (oh god today is December). if i were able, the thing I’d do next is re-read draft 5, taking notes as I go in order to assess what I have made. but something is telling me not to.

i am probably not going to work on To Name the Fire at all right now. whether that means for the next week or the next month or the next season i really can’t say. i sense something related to it hovering on the edge of my awareness, and i know that means that the only productive thing I can do right now is dream.

i’ll let you know when the dreams resolve.