PoB - Return of the tree of fire
2368 more words assessed on Nov.16th. I’m done with the flashback with Erthel’s mom’s disappearance, now back to the present.
I’ve met quite a few character glitches in this scene. Erthel is very, very passive in this phase and her watching-being shocked-thinking routine really slows down the narration when it should be something frenzied instead. It makes sense for her to be shocked given that she and her mother are in a dangerous situation they have no clue how to handle, but even shocked people usually do something instead of just watching and thinking: like something desperate, or just calling for help if they can’t make it on their own. When she eventually realize that there IS something she can do and reacts, she’s awesome, but there’s a lot of filler around.
I’m still not agonizing over the flaws I find though, and this phase of evaluating my process of finding the story and characters page-by-page is still fun and interesting - to the point that when I go to work, I can’t wait to be home again so I can read more pages.
In the next scene, where Erthel wakes up at home with the high bloodline waiting for her downstairs so they can question her, she starts out much better, but I realized it doesn’t make much sense that they actually went where she lives and waited for her to wake up, especially since in the same scene it’s established that the Matriarch (Faurel and Karel’s mom) hasn’t left their estate in years.
I’ve also noticed that I’ve slipped in here and there a couple of minor swearwords that don’t make sense outside of western culture (i.e. the Italian equivalent of “what the hell is happening”), more stuff that I’ll have to watch out for when it comes to the edit phase.
