Beyond the Endless Sky

Correcting the Theme

All right. So examining the current iteration thematically, I might have mentioned that there is a fairly strong theme running through the novel, and it's fairly heavy-handed.

Also, it's demonstrated by the entire crew of the Ravens' Child. Sorrow and wings, being the children of unkindness.

Leslie has the loss of his family from bandits, Anita has being raised in slavery by a raider island, and only being kept with her family because she worked as their assistant with the engines. Tonya has her parents addicted to Deadgrass, and how in every race she took part in, the stakes were too high. Yannick survived on the streets, victim to every small, vagrant cruelty. Mercy was a ward of Volante since her clan shunned her out of shame, since her family took up banditry and piracy. Vincent was castoff from the Monastery, then from Volante's navy.

The trouble, as it should be noted, wasn't the theme. It's a good theme. Nor was its relevance to the story, since it touches every other character in the story. Except for Clarissa. And that separation both weakens her as a character, and weakens the story itself.

Here's what I did to fix that. (And by fix, I'm not talking about making it perfect. I don't want it to be perfect, because perfect means I can't possibly make it better. And the idea that I could never make something better than what I just made is a terrifying thought)

Part of it was evaluating Clarissa as a character.

Clarissa is a ward of the Monastery, and much like many of your childhoods, there are aspects you treasure and a great deal you take for granted. To her, the education she received was the only childhood she knew, and she had no real reason to imagine her life could be different. So a lot of it bored her, she didn't seize the advantage it offered the way she could have.

Why should she have? Do you extend the sails and overtax the engine when the current is taking you where you want to go? Or when it's the only place you could go?

And so for Clarissa, even more so than it was for Vincent, having your course abruptly changed was frightening. (Vincent at least to some degree had it coming, he was castoff for being rebellious, and the adults apart from the Vicar fully expected him to come crawling back to their house in Vol Ayre, begging to be taken home)

-So I tweaked the first few chapters to better reflect that. It helps explain Clarissa's fear and despair in the opening chapter, when she doesn't want to go. She's worried she's getting the same treatment as the exile (still used as a warning to keep others from stepping out of line). This worry makes it hard to see Vincent's words as anything other than scorn, even when he's trying to deflect their unwanted passengers from the truths they can't reveal. Which also lends some more punch when Vincent gives her the necklace the Abbess paid to ferry Clarissa to the Shield, saying he hasn't earned it yet.

-After that, adding something of her Monastery schooling to her work with Anita in engineering was pretty easy, and minimally invasive.

-Her first meeting with Yannick is the second noteworthy change that had to happen. After all, Clarissa gets to realize that her childhood not only could have been far worse, but that someone else might have appreciated her childhood better than she had.

-On the top deck with Leslie, she sees what it takes to fight a battle. People she thought were kind turn somewhat monstrous. Leslie goes from kind to cruel, Mercy really doesn't meet up with her name, and Vincent treats the battle with the cold, clinical professionalism that Clarissa used to think of for solving math problems.

-Made it clearer that Leslie's next meal was a sort of apology for putting Clarissa through those circumstances.

-Part of me wanted Clarissa to turn cruel on Yannick in this part, to help illustrate those 'small cruelties' he was raised on. But I decided against it. Not because I wasn't willing to have Clarissa do something like that, but because doing it would have meant Clarissa had taken pride in her education, rather than simply letting the current carry her through most of her childhood.

-Mercy reminds Clarissa that not only can people be cruel, but that she and the others on the Child are that way because circumstances demand it. That perhaps, both she and the Monastery are too divorced from the cruelties of the skies to know how to properly care for the Box.

-At the end, Clarissa goes from being afraid of being abandoned by the Monastery, to being ready to leave them if she doesn't have a say in the course her life takes. Because she's seen that changing course isn't the end she was afraid it was.

So the thematic edit didn't require a redraft. Sort of.

The plan is to redraft the story once I finish the structural edit. I'll need to, because if the other parts of the structural edit change as much as tweaking the theme did, I'll need the redraft to mix the changes into the story properly.

So far so good, though. Onto the Worldbuilding edit.