It is so very frustrating to be waiting for the reviews to come back. It isn't that I want glowing praise dripping with words telling me it's wonderful. False praise does nothing for the book sitting on the shelf, trying to entice readers to take an interest. Of the dozen copies that I sent out, I received one full response, and one for the first few chapters. Both agreed on one thing; the first chapter was too slow. They were right. It was one big back-story data dump. I chopped out about four or five thousand words, right up to the action. I created a short prologue to cover some of it in an interesting scene, and some more got squeezed into the next few chapters. Only some. I left out a lot that the reader is going to have to discover later on. In the meantime, I'm up to working on chapter three of Raiu.

Sent the revised Raiju out to peer review. It's a little bigger than when I first put it out, and I like it a lot better now. All I have to do is sit back and nibble fingernails until the comments come back. In the meantime I'll start on the next bit with Raiu so that it can become better. One of my terrible habits is the automatic compression of ideas. I can write a sentence, that in my thoughts carries the impact of hundreds of words, and I have to keep remembering that not all readers will fill in those gaps. In truth very few of the readers would intuitively see the unwritten parts the way that I had them in my head. I'm trying to go back and fill in those holes so that my stories actually look the way my characters told it looked.

Closed out another chapter in Ion:417 Raiju. That makes ten chapters looking much better than they did before. I figure that there's another twelve to fifteen thousand words to wade through before I find some people willing to give it an honest preview. Once that's done it will be my first book that I'll hire an editor for. At this rate that means about a week. Now I've made a few changes that are going to need to be carried through Raiu, Katana, and Otako