As promised, here’s my author’s review of my second book, Freelance Heroics. Without unnecessary delay, let’s get to it!
As I mentioned in my previous post, Freelance Heroics is the better written of my two books from a technical perspective. It would be worrying if this were not the case! An author ought to get notably better at the nuts and bolts of writing between his first and second books. This is especially noticeable in Adv5, where the combat writing is a lot stronger than in the tail end of WSR—though that’s also an outgrowth of the format of that story, since the tournament setting gives a lot more inherent structure to the battles. Even so, the skirmishes are all clear, punchy, and don’t overstay their welcome, and when I realized I didn’t have anything interesting to say/show in a certain battle (such as the one between Mazik and Rynthe), I got through it fast. I think that shows a fair amount of improvement as a writer right there, because it better respects the reader’s time.
On the other hand, the arc of FH isn’t as good as it was in WSR. This isn’t surprising, and is by design, since it was written to be more like four premium TV episodes as opposed to one long movie. It is regretful that there doesn’t seem to be as coherent of an arc between those shorter stories, though, which is a result of a problem I mentioned in my last post: overlarge concern with small details which take up entire stories when I could have managed them with small sidebars. The biggest offender here is the orcks, which I spend all of Adv6 building up into this huge threat, something which will hopefully pay dividends later on but doesn’t pay them now, and could have been done in another, smaller way.
On the subject of Adv6, I realized while reading it that I don’t like that Adv that much. I don’t think it’s bad, but I have a feeling it’s largely unnecessary, and I wrote it instead of other, better short story ideas I had at the time because I was waiting for other elements (characters, primarily) to appear before I was ready to do those. This was a huge boon with Adv8, which I never anticipated and like a lot, and even with Adv7, which is a good bit of goofy fun, but Adv6 ended up overlong and not nearly so inspired. It also featured an overreaction to my mushy combat writing in WSR, where the technical combat writing is much better … but the conflict itself isn’t plotted nearly so well, so all the time I spend making the movement-to-movement writing better still ends up feeling overlong and bogged down. Lesson learned: combat needs to be written well, but I also need to write the right thing.
This is the book where Gavi and Raedren really come into their own. It’s more obvious with Raedren, where I began taking his PoV more and more, and realized how powerful that is. Raedren is a quiet guy, so if I was writing a TV show it would be really hard to keep him from fading into the background, but since I was writing a book, I found I could plant the audience behind his eyes and let us experience the world through him, which allowed him to add color and personality to the proceedings without having to speak. It really helps give a better idea of who he is, and it’s a tactic I’m going to continue to employ in the third book. I also really enjoyed torturing him romantically. If Rae is going to get his lovey-dovey hopeless romantic happy ending, he’s going to have to suffer for it!
What? Authors gotta be sadists sometimes. I’m just doing what’s best for the story. *cackles gleefully*
The reason Gavi is such a star is perhaps less obvious, but FH expounds on an attribute I first became aware of in WSR, and it’s why she’s become my favorite character. (I know you’re not supposed to have a favorite, but shut up I do … for now.) Credit to my editor Christina Tinling for first pointing it out, in a comment when she was editing the flashback scene in WSR where Gavi is practicing magick, and her instructor is trying to get her to give up and become a div. Here’s the line:
“No, sir. It doesn’t [sound good].” Gavi raised her head and looked the instructor in the eyes. “I’m going to do it. I won’t give up.”
If Gavi was a superhero (and she is), her superpower would be force of will. She’s willpower incarnate. I could go on and on about this, but I don’t want to give away the whole goose. I’ll just say that the thing about Gavi is, she’s not surviving and thriving as an adventurer because she’s powerful, like Mazik and Raedren are. She’s not even doing well because her friends are powerful, though that does help them all. She’s succeeding because of the intangibles, the special qualities that make her her, and which can’t easily be taught or duplicated because she mostly doesn’t even know what the X factors are. But it’s all about how she approaches the challenges she faces, about her worldview, self-control, and problem solving, and this book really reveals how her brain ticks, especially in her determination in training, and how she keeps failing and continuing on anyway. I especially like taking her PoV in battle scenes, and I think the final scene of the last battle of Adv8 is perhaps the best scene I’ve published so far.
In comparison, Mazik doesn’t exactly fade into the background during Freelance Heroics—I doubt he would know how to be a wallflower if he tried, he loves the spotlight too much—but he’s definitely less of a focus. Much of that is because he had the big arc in WSR where he wanted to become an adventurer, and now he is, so he won’t grow again until there’s something new he wants (or I threaten what he has). The other half is there simply isn’t as much growth in FH as in WSR, and Mazik wasn’t the focus.
I missed the footnotes, and I don’t feel like the banter is as top notch as in Wage Slave Rebellion. As I said in my last post, I feel like my writing technique in FH is much better, but the settings are weaker and there’s not as much whimsy, particularly in the description. That’s something I’m going to try to reintroduce in the next book.
Of the individual Advs, Adv8 is my favorite, both because it introduces the spellhound Twenty-seven (name to be revealed in Book 3), but also because it combines a clearer setting, much better combat writing, and my first attempt at writing a mystery (which I could have done better at laying the foundation for, but over all I think the mystery turned out pretty good). Adv7 and Adv5 are both fun, they’re more pulpy affairs (no one is at risk of dying, or not much), so both writing and reading them was really fast and fun. Adv6 remains the black spot, probably if I were doing it again I wouldn’t write it, though I did like the Blue Boar a lot. Characters who annoy Mazik are a lot of fun. I might introduce someone like that again.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about FH to me is how many more notes I took while reading it than with WSR. Part of that is because I spent much more time writing WSR, so it’s been thoroughly ingrained on my soul, but it’s also because Freelance Heroics is a lot closer to being really good moment-by-moment, which meant it was easier to diagnose what I could do better next time. While rereading WSR was mostly a fun thing to do for me, rereading my second book will really help me level up my game, because I was better able to feel what wasn’t/was almost working, and figure out maybe why. A good sign, hopefully.
In the end, I feel like the most damning criticism of Freelance Heroics is that it was published as a full-length book, so its lack of plot heft in comparison to WSR makes it seem more forgettable, even if it’s the better book in a lot of ways. I don’t regret writing it, but as far as experiments go, I think publishing a full novel-length collection of shorter adventures was mostly a failure. If I write shorter adventures in the future, I’ll probably release them separately, or maybe bundle a couple together. How much stronger would Freelance Heroics have been if it was only Adv5 and Adv8? We’ll never know, and some good stuff would have been lost, but my feeling is it would have been much improved. Now I know for next time.
First, though, I need to finish writing Book 3. Expect some radio silence from me for a while as I chip away at it. Cheers!
