In Review: A Fool's Goddess - Chapter Twenty-One

Good evening. Welcome to another review, coming at you live from Quarantinesville, California. Being one of the lucky few to retain their job, I’m doing as dandy as can be expected, and I hope you’re making the best of your cards as well.

To be honest, I’m pretty tired—enough that I considered skipping this week. My dog recently gave me a health scare where she suddenly had difficulty standing and walking and appeared to be suffering lethargy. Of course, I had her ass run to the vet ASAP, but, being a dumb fuck, I tried looking her symptoms up online as well.

Naturally, every source screamed “cancer”.

So I’m sure it’s of no surprise that I’ve been very stressed for the past couple weeks. I ended up spending about $800 to have the vet run every possible test—all of which came back negative. They were not able to confirm what’s been ailing her, but considering she improved drastically after we started her on a joint health supplement and anti-inflammatories, my eight year-old German Shepherd likely just developed arthritis. It might seem obnoxious to find out the solution was so simple after spending so much, but I couldn’t be happier to know that I’ve still got a few more years with my best friend.

Besides, considering all Clementine's done for me, $800 ain’t shit.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the good news until last Friday. Add on how the work at my day job’s been picking up and the exhaustion hit me like a truck today. If this was a larger chapter, I might have actually delayed things, but I think I can manage this little chunk. Thus, allow me to try and make some decent discussion out of my past work once again.

I’ll open by apologizing for the shit pacing between this and the prior chapter (and the next one, to be frank). I remember I used to have Chapters 20-22 combined as a single section, but I broke them apart in the interest of…a high chapter count, I guess. I know I was knee-deep in a Monogatari novel at the time that had shorter chapters, so I believe I thought it was a good idea to bust my chapters apart as well.

Of course, my present mind doesn’t agree with how I did this. I can somewhat understand separating 21 from 22, but 20 and 21 should have remained a single chapter. There isn’t enough ‘time’ between the scenes or a sufficiently pronounced transition to warrant separating them. Instead, all it does it needlessly partition sections of the story.

Okay, be forewarned: I’m about to start genuinely talking out of my ass here. I haven’t come across discussion on the following subject in any writing assistance books I’ve read, so please be careful about taking anything I say on the matter seriously.

With that established, let’s talk about ‘meta-pacing’.

Obviously, that’s just the term I made up to describe the flow of your story outside of its own narration, primarily through how you section off pieces of the story. I don’t believe for a second that I’m the first person to consider this aspect of storytelling, but again, I don’t have memories of anyone else tackling the subject either. I’m sure there’s also parts of meta-pacing I’m not aware of, so please forgive me for just talking about chapter breaks today.

What I do remember reading plenty about is narrative pacing, with one of my favorites being the placement of speech signifiers. These helpful little bits are what tell you who says what (Ex: “Is that so?” said Varnicrast. “Well, I main Metera!”) while also adding a bit of personality or tone to your dialogue. I think I’ve also gone over the benefits of using them sparingly, but I digress. The important thing to keep in mind about signifiers is placing them at natural breaks in a person’s speech.

Another example, “Is that so? Well, I,” said Varnicrast, “main Metera!”, has a completely different feel to it. Your brain assumes there was a pause between “Well, I,” and “main Metera!”, proving the power of the signifier. It feels less natural, or like there was more emphasis on the “I”—though I’d personally use italics if I wanted that effect. You can, of course, use this trick as needed to give your dialogue the proper feel, but it’s important to keep in mind how readers will interpret it.

Now, I bring signifier placement up because it’s not all that different from the effects of where you place your chapter breaks. By cutting Chapter 21 out of 20, it now feels like there’s space between the chapters when not even a minute passed narratively speaking. It’s not absolutely dreadful—the subject matter of 20 and 21 are distinct enough that I can understand my past self’s intentions—but I probably would instead elect to cut the excess from the chapters and combine them or expand on 21 to warrant its individuality were I writing A Fool’s Goddess today.

Properly chunking your story is important to do, as making it a single run-on piece would be difficult and likely exhausting on the readers. Chapters act as natural break points for people to put your story down and attend to other matters, so keeping them too long can make some readers feel compelled to push on long after they’ve grown hungry for respite. Likewise, making them too short can mess with the reader’s perception of time. Any cut-off point feels like an undefined pause, so needlessly partitioning your story just comes off as awkward and annoying. It’s a delicate balance that I am still working to understand myself and I’m likely to muck a few more times in the future.

Though I think I can at least refrain from breaking my chapters apart just so I can have a nice, clean count of 30. I’ve grown that much…

As for Chapter Twenty-One itself, the content is mostly fine. It’s more of filing in the story blanks since the time-skip, though it was nice to show how Tresety—and Tzofiya—have grown. Of course, it’s another example of my love for dialogue, and I had a ton of fun writing more of Lior and Tzofiya’s banter.

I do remember having some trouble with the feeling for Lior’s reaction to fall of the Heralds of the Divine. I wanted him to feel aggressive on the matter, but I think he came off as bloodthirsty in some of my earlier drafts. I clearly toned him down, but I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to showcase his hatred more. Might have helped make the chapter feel more complete, who knows.

Other than that, I’m just seeing more of my usual trouble spots. A poor understanding of punctuation, less than ideal word choices, lack of commitment to certain ideas—all things I continue to work on improving. There are a few bits in there that I’m quite happy with, though, so I’m not gonna rail on 21 too hard.

I’ll give ‘er 73.4/100.

And I’m gonna stop here. My eyelids are too heavy. As I feared, I ended up writing more than I had in mind, but hopefully there’s a nugget of wisdom in there—or at least something to laugh at. Either way, I’ll pray it was worth reading.

Alright, take care, friend. Let’s both get some rest, and I’ll see you again next time.

Namaste.