by Ian Fallis

I’ve now heard back from four of my five critical readers, and I expect to hear from the final one this weekend. So the revisions of Book 4, The Dwarf’s Legacy, will likely happen next week.

What I love about this team of critical readers is how differently they look at things.

Two of them gave me lists of typos and punctuation and grammar issues. In case you were wondering, spell check doesn’t help. I write in Word, and after a certain number of errors, Word just stops trying to spell-check. You reach that point pretty early in a 100,000-word book with a lot of words in made-up languages.

I’m certain that these two lists will mostly coincide, but having two people on the team who think that way means we’re more likely to find all those errors.

Another person is mainly concerned with story issues. She spotted two things in the book that seemed to work out too easily. She also spotted one thing that made no sense – a character suddenly showed up in a scene where it made no sense. That’s because I had the wrong name in the scene. “Where’d he come from?” From a stupid mental lapse. But I have the power to make his disappear. Bwahahahaha! (Sometimes revisions are fun.)

The fourth critical reader tends to look not only at the story, but at broader social issues. Am I reinforcing negative stereotypes, or bad tendencies in culture, or am I challenging them?  She had a field day with The Dwarf’s Legacy, pointing out that one character was quite unjustly maligned, while another was getting away with stuff. And those things fell right in line with how our society, generally speaking, incorrectly treats those kinds of people. That’s not the kind of thing I want to be saying to readers, even subtly. In fact, it might be worse to say things like that subtly. If I said them outright, your defenses would be up. When they’re in the background, they can sneaking into your brains when your guard is down. And that kind of tactic I save for really nefarious messages, like “Buy more books!”

The fifth reader is the kind who is not afraid to let me know what she, as a reader, is thinking at different points. For example, if something irritates her, or if there’s a question she wants answered, she’ll write it right in the manuscript she’s reading. It’s great to have a gauge on what readers are thinking, because that can be tough for a writer to understand.

The good news is that I can see exactly what each of them is talking about, and I’ve already been thinking through how I can address some of these things. I don’t anticipate the revisions taking long, but I do anticipate that they will make the story much better.

Thanks for your patience as I work to ensure that this book is a journey you’ll enjoy.

Tags: The Dwarf's Legacy, writing

The Dwarf’s Legacy will not be released until mid-March.

I apologize for the delay from the intended February release. And I am sorry it took me so long to come to this decision, and to share this with you.

But I believe this is the correct decision.

At this point, I have received feedback from two of my five critical readers. This is even more of a problem than it might appear at first.

You can probably guess that I really want to hear from the other three before I move forward with publishing The Dwarf’s Legacy. You may not know that all of these critical readers are helping me out as a favor and have lives of their own. I appreciate their help, and while I’m asking about their progress, I’m not going to pressure them. It doesn’t help me as a writer or you as a reader if they rush.

But wait, there’s more.

I have told you before that I had to do a pretty serious rewrite of this fourth book – far more serious than any previous book in the series. So with the first three books, I was sending my critical readers books that I had written and then edited and revised. But The Dwarf’s Legacy was not edited as much by me.

You know what that means?

It means the two critical readers who have checked in so far have found a few issues that go beyond typos. So after I make revisions to address these issues, the book will have to be carefully checked again.

So my to-do list looks like this:

• Politely prompt my critical readers for their response
• Revise and edit the manuscript
• Have two or three of them go through The Dwarf’s Legacy again.
• Do the final edit, then the final proofreading
• Format the text for paperback and Kindle

I am going to set a tentative publication date of March 14, in part at least because I will be at an event that weekend. I will keep you updated.

Again, please permit me to apologize for the delay.

Tags: The Dwarf's Legacy, writing