Filed Away

The latest chapter of the novel is up at 3500years.com. I try to put up a chapter every couple of weeks, but it can get spotty, particularly if it’s a longer piece. I read through everything and try to fix anything that makes me cringe, but it’s mostly as it was initially released. We really needed an editor, and actually had a large portion of the book edited by a friend of Dean’s, but he hated what came out of that and refused to consider any editing after that.

This is probably one of my least favorite chapters in the book, mostly because Zsallia seems to step out of character a little- we were trying to give her a more human face after all her hard hearted bitchiness in chapters one through nine. I think it didn’t do a good job where that was concerned. The other problem was that it finally introduces two major characters, ten chapters into the book. Edna was originally introduced in the prelude, along with setting the scene for her house in Pennsylvania.

The original prelude was, in my opinion, so very powerful and really set the tone for the book, but it raised hackles with a couple of our test readers and got dumped (though part of it lives on as Chapter 8). Breaks my heart that the original file was lost because that’s the kind of thing I would post here, if I still had it.

You can find all the posted chapters here, in reverse order.
Methuselah’s Daughter, A Novel