Azarinth Healer

More specific thoughts on the changes from here on out, if you’re interested.

While Book 1 had more issues on a technical line editing level, book 2 (chapters 75-151) was more difficult from every other perspective. I remember setting up patreon at around that time and writing Azarinth Healer became something more serious for me. Instead of writing when I felt like it, I felt like I had to deliver at least 2-3 chapters every week. And instead of just having fun with it and seeing where it led, I wanted to think about the plot more, wanted to add better characters, wanted to write about more “serious” topics. Looking back at it, I can see how some of that worked and a lot of it didn’t.

The characters, specifically Ilea’s team, feel a little more grounded than some of the earlier more one dimensional characters like Earl or Roland. But at the same time, they felt much less fun to me. There is something there, I could tell that I tried to think about it more but my skill just wasn’t there, meaning that the execution just didn’t live up to what I had in my mind.

This is seen throughout the entire dialogue and all the interactions in this section of chapters. For example Trian’s behavior as an arrogant noble at the start to create conflict came off as strange and unnatural to me, same with his sudden change to a more reasonable mindset. Eve felt inconsistent and childish, reminded me of an anime character, though admittedly probably the most fun to read compared to the others, and why I think some people liked her the most out of the team. There was some mystery to her too. She had goals that we didn’t know about and the other characters were just kind of there. Claire was just not particularly interesting, lacked drive and motivation. Kyrian at least had the stuttering thing and his insecurities to stand out, to me he was the best written new character in this section but not particularly fun to read either.

In the edits, I rewrote what feels like nearly the entire dialogue and most if not all of the character interactions. I’m much happier with how things are now. It feels like the actions of the various people make more sense and they just overall feel more fleshed out to me.

Next to the character work, I think the pacing was the most prominent issue in this section and likely due to the aforementioned change to patreon and a more serious approach when it came to plotting. Now again, my skill at the time was just not there yet, so while I put in a lot more thought, the end result was nowhere near as fun and fast moving as the earliest section of the story. Where I flashed from place to place to have fun at the beginning, I started to consider consequences, power scaling, factions, and the overall world much more here, and because I was overwhelmed with managing all that, it results in heavily bogged down pacing.

I didn’t just end the scene and go to the next fun thing anymore, I wanted to write things out, wanted things to make sense, wanted there to be stakes. I just didn’t know how exactly to do any of that. So it results in several chapters of training without much of anything happening, information gathering and exposition that doesn’t lead to anything. And still, when things happen, they aren’t foreshadowed because I was too insecure in my writing to stick to something. I essentially tried to make the story go on but didn’t really know how to. So when the training becomes tedious, the team goes on missions, and when that too bogs things down, demons attack! And you can really tell where I started certain scenes or sections and simply couldn’t go back to remove or edit them because in my mind, I had to get the next chapter out.

All this coupled with the different PoVs and various storylines going on, this section felt very unfocused, tension rises and then doesn’t lead to anything, entire chapters feel repetitive without doing anything in the vein of characterization, fun, plot, or even exposition.

In the edits, we moved around a lot of scenes, I added new scenes, and cut and rewrote entire sections as well. I’m still not perfectly happy with the pacing in the first chunk of the book but it’s much much better, and the rest now flows much smoother.

Also like in book 1, I added a ton of seeds for future plot points, places, secrets etc. Just to make it a bit more fun for you peeps who know the original story already :). There’s one thing especially that I’m interested to see if anyone will pick up on.

So ye, those are the main thoughts.

Quick thanks to both my editor and copy editor at Portal. As well as to Andrea for the audiobook work.

As always, thanks for reading and for continuing to check out what I make :). It means a lot.