Recently I embarked upon a novel project. Not a strenuous one, but certainly novel, and of concern to my novels. You see, once my disastrous two-year return to the world of full-time sales came to an end, and I began working on Book 3 again in earnest, I had an uncomfortable realization: it had been so long since I’d spent real time working on my books that I’d forgotten some of what happened.
Embarrassing, to say the least.
Not big things! Just small details, where I couldn’t remember whether I’d decided to go this way or do this other thing back when I was writing them. (Mostly it was with descriptive details.) Which is pretty damning, since if anybody’s gonna know, it’s supposed to be me.
Hence my little project. I decided to read my own books, which isn’t something I’ve really done before. I’ve read the words while writing them, or while editing them, or while processing proofreads, but I’ve never sat down and read my books more like a reader would, with the main focus on the reading as opposed to long detours into fixing something. (Though I did mark some copy errors as I went, for later implementation.)
It was actually pretty cool. They say “Write what you want to read,” but the awful truth is that writing it makes it impossible to read it like the consumer I wish to be, since it’s so inextricably tied to myself. Time and distance helps, though, so I was able to get closer to acting like a regular old reader of these books.
What follows is my impression of Wage Slave Rebellion—though still from an author’s point of view, because I can’t fully disentangle myself from my work, and because even when I’m reviewing someone else’s work I still approach it with a storyteller’s eye. So call it a “How I think I did” update. Let’s go.
Over all, I’m relatively pleased with how Wage Slave Rebellion reads. The technical writing isn’t as good as Freelance Heroics, no surprise there, but I think the overall plotting of WSR is much stronger. I’m particularly pleased with Mazik’s arc in the book, which shows a clear change between his first scene in the prologue and his final one in the epilogue. That worked really well.
Adv1 seems like it should be an odd duck, since it’s a lot of talking and not much (any) action, but I really enjoyed it. This could well be author bias, but it’s always been important to me to illustrate that these characters are not some destined heroes, they never had to do this and nobody asked them to, so taking so much time to get them from “disaffected wage slaves” to “let’s try to be adventurers!” was important to me. But it also read pretty smoothly, without any of the “mush” that can be found in some of my early combat scenes. Everything up to when Gavi successfully follows the kidnappers back to their base I really enjoy.
What’s less good is my early combat writing. The fighting in the warehouse scene is particularly mushy, without a lot of direction or structure to keep it under control. I also make Mazik & co seem way overpowered in these scenes, which combines to be a huge problem. I like the warehouse scenes up to the point where the trio and the hostages get discovered by the cultists, but the rest of the warehouse scenes after that are a mess. If I ever go back and fix anything in these two books, it’d be there.
In contrast, the final battle has a lot of mushy elements as well—I really need to get better at giving plot-based direction to my combat scenes, because chaotic melees just don’t work well in text—but it’s written stronger over all, the trio doesn’t feel as overpowered (the Loci really help with this), and the weaknesses are a lot harder to tease out. No surprise, given it was rewritten several times, including once after initial publication. Still much room for improvement, but considering how worried I was about the final battle after reading the warehouse scenes, I’m glad.
Raedren was criminally underutilized in WSR, but I already knew that. It’s something I took pains to improve in FH, successfully (I’ll post a similar review of my second book shortly), which is good because he’s mostly a plot elements or a person to bounce quips off of in the first book.
Gavi, I love. I’ll talk about her more in my review of FH, but she’s become my favorite character for reasons I never expected. She ended up having attributes I never planned or even consciously imbued her with, they were just an outgrowth of who she was and all the real people I stole traits from to create her, and it made her an absolute rock star. Like I said, more on her in the next post, but my main regret with her in WSR is she comes off as too fanservicey. This was by design, sort of, because I knew Gavi probably wouldn’t wear a skirt ever again (she’s a pants kind of gal, or occasionally a nice dress), so I was having some fun with it while the opportunity remained, but I forgot that not everyone would know that, so she comes off as too fanservicey in the middle parts. That’s another problem rectified by FH, as I knew it would be.
Oh, and the Tyrant rocks. She’s the stand out character of WSR for me, she’s so much fun. I glided through that scene, both when I was writing it and when I was reading it this time. She’s great.
I love love looooove the city of Houk. That’s probably the element I most missed in writing Freelance Heroics, and have been trying to recreate in Book 3. There’s so much life and personality in Houk as a setting. That informs how much more whimsical the writing is, with much richer descriptive text and more good, funny footnotes (which I regret turning away from so completely in FH), which are both elements I plan to revive for Book 3 as well. If I had to summarize, I’d say FH is more technically adept, but WSR has more personality and heart, largely as an outgrowth of its richer setting.
As for the world building and magic system, there are definitely mistakes I made early on in constructing them (especially the magic system) which come across as needlessly pedantic and concerned with unimportant details. That comes from the uber-nerd I used to be, who was ruthless about noticing inconsistencies and possible logic gaps, which made me want to address all possible objections in the text. Too bad it ended up only partially working, and definitely bogged down the text. It might have actually been in FH, but the scenes where I describe how a caster estimates their mana pool is illustrative. I mean, why? It’s details like that which really benefited from my reading these books now, because I realized just how boring those passages are. I still like the central conceit of my magic system—arcane magick that’s hard and follows the rules, and divine magick that’s easy and doesn’t—but I’d certainly streamline the arcane side if I were redoing it all now, and make the divine side even more fantastic. Maybe you’ll see some of that in upcoming books.
Over all, I’m largely happy with how Wage Slave Rebellion turned out. There are definitely things I would change, details I would do differently if I were writing it again, but by and large it’s in a place where fixing the weaknesses would risk destroying its strengths, and thus isn’t worth messing with. (Outside of a few of those warehouse scenes, which I might fix as a reward to myself once Book 3 is well on its way to publication.)
Next time, I’ll give you my author’s review of Freelance Heroics, while I continue to write the followup to both.
