Rethinking the structure

Yesterday we made the somewhat painful decision to review the entire structure of the book.

I had started to go a little too crazy on the line-to-line edit and yet didn’t feel thrilled about how things were brought on in the book. Which is why, after talking it out, we were able to see what works and what doesn’t.

And so, we decided that it made sense to change a fair amount in the book’s structure.

The story is there, and it is not a full rewrite thankfully. We are just going to rework how things are brought along, mixing action and information more than it currently does. Especially at the beginning of the book, as we didn’t want to have a big exposition dump before getting to the core of the story.

We also decided to change the POV for certain chapters, as it makes more sense not to have everything from Mara, our FMC’s, point of view. Especially because other characters already had their POVs but had smaller parts, which felt wrong, and changing the POV will help the reader understand those characters better. And since they will play a key role in the next two books, it’s important to us that we know as much about them as possible and not just what Mara sees in them.

We talked for a while and have now decided on the structure and are moving on to rewriting/editing the story to fit that. Which, to be honest, feels a bit daunting because we’d just finished round two of edits, but we feel this is the right move for our book.

It will remove a lot of filler and coming and going in the book, which we feel much better about, and should make for a more thrilling and more balanced story without a slow middle.

Because of this, we have decided to slightly postpone sending queries to agents and releasing the manuscript to ARC readers. You can, of course, still sign up to become one, but you might have to wait until we’re done with this edit round.

Wish us luck.