There's more to do for the second draft than I thought.

For example, for a long time I had imagined my first chapter as this perfect thing, because it came to me kind of out of nowhere and wrote itself quickly and launched the whole story with a bang. Once it actually occurred to me to think about whether it needed revision, though, I found that it needed quite a lot.

Some things had changed since I wrote it. Anastasia had gotten quite a bit more backstory and it had become clear that she had never been even as close to normal as she seemed in parts of chapter 1. One of her first lines had explained that she flung her book away and stomped downstairs for sheer satisfaction, but in fact she's a cold and purpose-driven person, apart from a weird impulsive streak, who wouldn't know satisfaction if it bit her on the nose. Her original persona was appealingly wry, I thought, but as she developed it became more clear that that just wasn't her.

The Morandau, her people, had also been explained rather more. So some of the things that Anastasia and her people allowed to happen in chapter 1 might have been plausible for ordinary people, but they made no sense for what she and her people had become since I first wrote the chapter.

And there were also embarrassingly many things that I simply hadn't thought about when I first wrote them, little stupid things that no intelligent people would really do in the situation I described, even if they weren't hardened mercenaries trained from birth. Like, why would the raiders dismount from their horses? There were several obvious reasons why they should not, starting just from the fact that getting on and off horses is quite an exertion. And why didn't Anastasia post a few of these sharp-eyed children on watch?

I wanted to fix all these little discrepancies just because that's my goal with this story, to eliminate stupidity. And even if few of whatever readers I get will ever be nitpicky enough to care about such things, I have an idea that there's some threshold of realistic consistency that I need to get above, in order to achieve the gritty tone that I want for my story. I don't want to bog down in detail, but I want to be sure I make it above that threshold. So there were a lot of details to revise, or else to justify. And there was stuff to take out, because it just wasn't something Anastasia would do or say.

Finally, Elmore Leonard died, and I read an obituary that linked to a short piece by him about how to write. I really liked Elmore Leonard's writing. Writing like him was definitely something I was hoping to do, as much as I could, at least with part of this book. And he said to do things like cut down on descriptions. He said never to use the word 'suddenly' — I think his point is that the suddenness should come from the shocking abruptness with which whatever it is hits the reader, not just from the author declaring that it was so. He said never to introduce dialog with any verb other than 'said', and never to qualify 'said' in any way. His point was that the characters' speech has to stand on its own, and not be helped along with stage directions from the author. Well, I'm not sure that's the only good way to write, and it might be especially worth reconsidering with first-person narration by the protagonist, since then the protagonist's choice of stage directions is also characterization. But in that spirit, it seemed to me that Anastasia Morandau probably would write a lot like Elmore Leonard.

I had already developed a few deliberately consistent notes for her style, which I then varied drastically in the second part of the book, which has a different narrator. She is quite capable of using long sentences but she's much more comfortable with staccato rhythm than I am myself, so even in my first draft I'd been immediately rewriting most of my paragraphs to break up her sentences. She always says 'perhaps' and never 'maybe', and she says 'perhaps' a lot. So I decided to take this further, and Leonardize her narration.

I'm turning Anastasia's every 'answered' and 'replied' and 'recalled' into a 'said'. I'll keep 'asked' for questions and I've left in a 'muttered'. I'm eliminating all descriptive attributes of 'said' or 'asked', and deleting every 'suddenly'. I'm also deleting an awful lot of commas. Anastasia is smart enough to know where commas are needed for clarity but when they aren't strictly necessary she'll leave them out. Her thought should feel fast and aggressive so I'll see how this works. It's possible that having too few commas actually works in the opposite direction, so I might need to put them all back.