Progress Report #3 for TOTW Chapter 14

I should be much further along with chapter 14 than I am. However, I'm pretty happy with where it's going. It finally feels like it's crackling to life.

Dumb things I seem to keep getting stuck on: Choosing which characters should be in a scene, choosing one or more locations, moving the right characters to new scenes, avoiding situations where I have to write dialogue for unimportant background characters... and making the final choices feel natural, not forced or contrived.

The White Phial - Chapter 1 (old/retired version) (Migrated Post)

[The following was originally posted to Tumblr on May 29, 2017.]

I’m about to upload a new version of The White Phial’s first chapter to AO3, which was long overdue for major editing. Mehra was in flux when I first started writing the story, and she quickly morphed into something very different from what I first imagined. The longer the story went on, the more out-of-character Mehra felt in the opening scene. So I finally made some changes and asked Gary to beta-read the chapter again. Unfortunately it meant throwing out some fun lines that I still like, but it was necessary to keep things feeling consistent.

Probably the other biggest change is that Rumarin is no longer interested in studying Mehra’s map of Skyrim. At this stage, Rumarin doesn’t particularly care who these people are or where they came from. He’s mostly focused what they can do for him right now. (Also, last year I decided Mehra and J’zargo never actually went to Ivarstead/High Hrothgar.)

In case people prefer the old first chapter or just want to compare, I’m posting the (mostly) original version here.

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