You’ve heard the advice: put your story in a drawer for a month or a week or a year and come back to it later. Look at it with fresh eyes.

Critiques work the same way. Sometimes you have to put them away, come back later to revise, to see and understand what the person was saying about your piece.

Fallen Kingdom is officially under revision. As I went through the critiques I have for the first chapter I saw things I hadn’t before, ideas to try, items to take away or add that weren’t in the notes I took but sat there on the page ready for me take the opportunity to make my story better.

I wrote Fallen Kingdom in a year. These critiques were from last January. I take a colored pen to them, underlining parts that I need to pay attention to as I work through a chapter.

This time I plan to put the revisions in as I complete each chapter and not wait until the end of the book. I hope that will cut down on the slog that punctuated the revisions of Dreamer’s War.

I received another rejection for Water Child. No other word on anything else.

So back to revisions. I’m fairly satisfied with the beginning. I still have to write two new scenes and bring them in earlier than they were before. Part of letting the reader in on the world.