This update finds me in the depths of some heavy duty revision of The Lost Tomb of Omo. I finally got all the pages back from Jessica, and her input confirmed my fears that the story had lost its pace early in the 3rd chapter. I was able to regain it in the 4th chapter, but then stumbled hard and lost it completely when I hit the 8th and 9th chapters. So it’s going to need some work to fix.
The problem was two-fold but wasn’t so much with the quality of my writing; it was with the pace and placement of said writing.
My prologue and first two chapters are good, and after revision I think chapter one is very strong. The issue starts after the 2nd chapter when I hand the characters an immediate problem to resolve: They need to find someone of importance that has gone missing and could be in danger. Starting with chapter three, they proceed to do everything but resolve that challenge for the next seven chapters, and I still hadn’t written the resolution!
Going by my gut feelings and the feedback, it’s not that what I wrote was bad or even not adding to the story. It was that I underestimated how frustrating an unresolved sub-plot can be for the reader. When you have a character say “we really have to find so-and-so and make sure they’re alright!”… Then they had better get to it! Unless you nullify the need or capacity for the character to act, you’re illustrating disingenuousness. Now, that may be your goal, but otherwise you’re undermining your characterization at best and frustrating your reader into distraction at worst. That’s what I’m learning from this, and I’m going to use the experience to craft a better story.
The 8th and 9th chapters failed so badly because I tried to introduce major concepts and plot points to the story prematurely and before I had ended the tension of the unresolved sub-plot. I think I was too eager to present that material… I feel that it is really good, but I need to present it at a different point in the story. A point where there is some downtime in the action and its insertion feels natural and logical.
Fixing things will require moving and retooling of chunks of material. For the most part, the excised material will be redistributed elsewhere in the story, where the timing is better for it. Things will need editing for sure, but I would have been revising it anyways.
Currently my revision plan begins with merging chapters two and three together after trimming significant verbiage from chapter three. The 2nd chapter was pretty short as is, and what will remain of the 3rd will make it more robust. That will remove my first stumble in pacing. Chapters four through six already flow pretty well, and with some reworking they will run even better. The big change will start in the end of chapter seven: I’ll start resolving the hanging plot point, get the lost character back into the story and move the primary plot forward with new material. Utilizing what I have from the old chapters eight and nine will come in later, after all the characters are back together.
Although moving the contents of the 8th and 9th chapters around involves a lot of work, it’s already bearing some fruit. A great deal of it is told in a different voice and style from the rest of the story, the intent being that it is a retelling of ancient history and mythology from the world the tale is set in. That material composes a “story within the story” that directly reveals some very important points needed to understand the greater plot and action. The passages also function to add detail to the constructed world.
One thing that I have already done is take the first part of this material, a retelling of a mythological origin story that is part of the cosmology of this world, and turn it into a new prologue. It works much better as a prologue, being short and connected to the story but also separated from it by time and voice. It start things off with an epic myth that the reader gets to see tie more and more into the greater story as it progresses.
It also works better presented standing on its own as opposed to how I originally did it: as one character telling a story to another. I say that because this story is very common knowledge for people of this world, so having it discussed in conversation was awkward given the situation I have to work with. It was analogous in some ways to two modern day people casually discussing a concise summary of the events of World War II after their plane has crashed and they barely survived… Not impossible to imagine in the right, if bizarre, circumstance but awkward all the same.
My original prologue works well and is a good hook, definitely a Call to Adventure. Now that I’m turning it into a chapter one it just feels right to me. It gives me an opportunity to add some new material that will allow me to illustrate a stage of the Hero’s Journey that I have skipped and the piece needs in my opinion… That being a taste of the Ordinary World.
So I have learned some lessons since my last update, and definitely have some work to do. But I’m not frustrated, I’m excited! I’m excited because things are coming together in different ways than I had first envisioned, ways that outshine the ideas that I thought were pretty awesome just a few months ago. Full steam ahead!
Aethereal Engineer 
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