Apr 24, 2024
To:Kaabii
First, to address the positives:
Thank you! I’d been worried about my worldbuilding from previous struggles with it, and I’m glad I was able to improve. My goal is to expand more upon the world in Backtrack without pushing it too much.
Dramatic scenes are what I live for. If I can’t at least get those right, I haven’t really written a good novel. That said, I’m glad you enjoyed Skirmish in the Static—it’s one of my favorite chapters too. I’ve gotten comments saying it’s unrealistic for Shiera to attack Aubrey in that instance, which… yeah maybe, but hey, it was cool.
The narrative was the most structured part of the story for me, at least when I was writing it. I had a whole section of my Google doc titled ‘Mystery -> Resolution’ where I would figure out how to do certain reveals. Shiera and Sakira’s relationship was actually never supposed to exist when I first started the story; when I was writing Chapter 6, I thought ‘hey it would be cool if he could talk to her through her head’ and suddenly that entire avenue opened up. That bond is now quintessential to the theme of the story, being trust.
Now, for the negatives:
Yeah no, I agree with you 100%. Let it be known I started writing this book three years ago—I had just discovered the power of important character flaws. I took ‘character flaws’ and ran with it, kinda. The balance of likable to unlikable never occurred to me as I was writing because “yeah, she’s a bitch, but she’s been in my mind for 6 years now, I can’t hate her”. As you were reading, I was sort of reading along with you, and I noticed a lot more issues with her than I’d realized there were. Thank you for calling it out.
I knew there would be problems trying to stuff The Clock Strikes Zero into essentially 4 chapters at the end. I’m not entirely sure why now, actually, but I set a thirty-chapter limit for myself way back when and felt obligated to abide by it. I tried to compensate for how squeezed it was by lengthening my chapters (this last one is a prime example of that), but that just put the pacing out on a cross to die. I’ve never been good at pacing—it’s a problem with every book I’ve ever written, every chapter even. Plotting the narrative chapter-by-chapter beforehand hasn’t helped me in Backtrack as much as I thought it would, either—it’s just one of those amorphous concepts I can’t quite get a hold on.
And Aka’s name was originally Red before this version of the novel. It’s always been like this. Since his inception, he has literally been a walking contradiction. It’s hilarious.
Thank you so much for reading through it all. It meant the world to me every time I got that little comment notification, and I’m so glad you decided to push to the end, despite the mid-to-alright writing. Once I’m a little further into writing Backtrack, I hope you’ll give it a chance too! Plus, I’m in the process of working my way through and updating the chapters. I’ll notify you if you want!
Thanks SOOOOO much,
Arufa
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