Notes on Revision 1

It’s been about a week and I’ve completed the first revision of tthhee oddiissee. Why didn’t anyone tell me how many glaring mistakes there were in this thing? Jesus Christ, speak up.

Anyway, I should get into the actual content of the Revision itself. This first revision is mostly about fixing some of the things I saw as major problems. I’ve gone over it before, but there’s a good amount of stuff that bothered me, especially in the early chapters. When I first started this, I wrote it, did a quick once over and sent it out. By the end I was much more careful and there was much less text to change. At least so far. The second revision may prove differently.

That brings me to my next point. THIS IS NOT THE FINAL DRAFT. It’s much better than it was, but I would like to go over it two more times before I’m comfortable sending it out. I’m uploading a PDF to the Patreon of the first revision. Here’s what I’ll tell you so you can be prepared. I’ve formatted the PDF to be closer to a manuscript format. Inch-by-inch margins, doubles spaced. Here’s what that means in practical terms: it is 433 pages (117242 words). It is unwieldy to say the least. I apologize for that, I guess.

So you’re also prepared, just in case you read the whole novel before, here’s a list of changes that have been made:

  • Changed Ro’s T-shirts and his underwear in the first chapter

    • I didn’t like either t-shirt I came up with in the original chapter

  • Removed the Colonel’s Accent

    • He might be the Colonel, but I didn’t want him to seem “Kentucky-Fried.” Didn’t make sense for the setting

  • Gave Ro and Mako one last night together

  • Structural changes to first dream

  • Correcting the Magician’s character

    • The Magician was far too malicious in Ro’s dreams originally, wanted him to seem more mysterious and aloof, less insulting

  • Renamed “Dexetrio” to “Dex”

  • Made the chapter in Dex far more clinical

    • I try to limit the amount of chapters written from the POV of characters other than Ro. This didn’t seem appropriate, so I changed it to medical report for anything that M was doing.

  • Changed the names of the scientists

    • Kept in line with “secrecy”

  • Removed the character of Geneon

    • She wasn’t much of a character and her presence seemed incongruous in the rest of the world. Replaced with the Magician. The conversation flows a little differently.

  • Changed the name of the bordello owner to “Mayze”

    • Didn’t want to seem like I was naming someone after Jay-Z.

  • Changed name of the client to “Dan”

    • Keeping with the joke that only the beastmen have “normal” names.

  • Made the masquerade ball explicitly tied to Dex

  • Made Krow less menacing

  • Made Nora less emotional


We’ll see what happens in Revision 2. I plan to take a day off before starting on it.

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