There’s a problem in this paragraph with the tenses, I think.
The keepers are a tightly structured…etc. and so on. I just escaped them, but writing about them in the past it’s like they are no more and that doesn’t make any sense.
Infiltrating the keepers was, admittedly, an ambitious long con to be undertaking alone. They were a tightly structured organization, with varying degrees of influence throughout the entirety of Wall. They liked people to focus on their humanitarian operations, on how they had taken on the full responsibility of ensuring seed resources were distributed consistently throughout the city, but that was never quite enough to overshadow the fact that they were also the city’s self-appointed peacekeepers and lawmakers. Their ranks were decisively closed to the public except by invitation, and the only employment opportunities afforded to the average civ were at the most peripheral, unglamorous edges of their everyday operations.
Heyyy, thank you!! I think you and Malin especially made some extremely good points about the tonal dissonance so I’m glad this feels smoother
Oh fair point! I suspect there are probably a few tense changes in that whole flashback section that could use a second look, although that may be one of the things I’ll circle back around to when I get to the stage of more targeted proofreading and revisions.
Oh yeah, speaking of which… I love Ozzy, but when will we meet the other confirmed RO? I’d like to know both before deciding on the route I want to follow.
If you don’t have pushback > 30 just before arriving at Kaori’s you don’t get any foreshadowing that someone is following you so it seems rather weird that when new patrons get inside you become all fidgety because you “feel” someone watching you.
I don’t get exactly what the pushback stat actually means but I played a rather cautious style when I noticed so maybe I would change the “weird feel” with: the MC, being a rather cautious person, sends more than a couple glances over the strangers and suddenly is aware that someone there is looking back with too much attention for MC linking…and, being still on the run, decides to leave the place with haste.
I’m not sure when that scene will end up fitting most naturally into the narrative, but I’d like to get it into chapter 2, or chapter 3 at the very latest. I definitely want readers to have ample time to get to know the characters and not feel like they’re getting locked into anything!
Ah yes, that is actually something I’m still rebalancing especially after rewriting big chunks of the first chapter. Hopefully some back-end tweaks and some later context will smooth that encounter out a bit.
