This is mostly silly. A problem with one of the early chapters is that nearly everyone noted it "feels" long even though it's not that much longer than the others. There are a number of issues: the sentences are too long for what should be a quick and fast-paced scene (bandits attack the village!), the descriptions feel quite remote as if the main character was only observing instead of being part of the action. It's vague in too many places instead of zooming on specific, vivid events and characters.

I've been editing this story for a lifetime (untrue) (but apparently still 179h41 over 141 days in the last 18 months, so CLOSE ENOUGH! XD), and because this is an early chapter it's one of those I've reread the most. So to shake things up a bit and try to experience it and its outline differently, I decided to storyboard it. It turned out surprisingly effective! It helped me narrow down on the key moments, and also give more agency to the bandits. Also it was fun.

At first, I drew two sides: one for the bandits, and one for the village, to show the preparations/lack thereof.

Then once the two collide, I started narrowing down on the key battle moments. By the 4th moment, I realised this was already a lot and stopped there. I removed a couple of unnecessary minor plot threads, like worries about a spell failing, and more magic stuff that's interesting but not particularly relevant to the scene or story. And I buffed up the 4 selected moments to make them more vivid.

( You don't need to be good at drawing. Are the bandits bringing torches to burn down the houses, or flower bouquets to secretly woo the villagers? Who knows! 😂 )

I think it was good just to help me think about the scene differently. My usual outlines sure look nothing like this!! I was also hoping to reduce the chapter's word count to make the prose tighter, but it ended up bubbling up because making things more specific required fleshing out background characters and actions. I think I'm okay with it, but I'll have to see how it flows when I do a full reread later, after I'm done and have taken a break from the story.

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

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Over the last week...

Commented in finalfantasy, bbtp_challenge.

Signal boosts:

• Just wanted to bring up pinchhits again as it's really great when current Pinch Hits are also shared there. I follow a bunch of exchange comms, but there are others I could also write for occasionally. Meanwhile, you can find recent PHs there for a couple of exchanges like raremaleslashex and justmarried!