With Chapter One finished and feedback received, I'm moving on to Chapter Two edits.
I already cut quite a bit from Chapter Two during a quick round back in February. Initially, the chapter started with Bartus packing in his room for a few pages, worried about the possibilities of what could happen and what his options are. I remember taking a long time to write this scene initially and never feeling fully satisfied. Now that I've finished the novel, it's easier to see that the scene simply wasn't necessary and that's why I couldn't make it work.
Rather than having Bartus start by thinking "what do I do," I'm going to forgo the possibility that there are any options besides return home. No need to have him make choices until later in the chapter, after he talks to his dad about still wanting to join the Engineer's Guild. We'll jump right into him walking through Telakaat for the last time to give a longing description and another statement of the "Want" ("to be worth something" as he says in the first chapter) in contrast with the idea of going home. Then it will be onto the small catamaran, where I'm going to place a larger focus on the random meeting of a traveling alchemist in order to introduce the reader to the conflict between the major religions earlier.
Using his (unwilling) discussion with the alchemist and a later discussion with his parents where he learns that an alchemist has healed his baby brother while he was away, I hope to create a microcosm of one of the side-long questions of the novel: what does it mean for my faith when people of other faiths have their prayers answered?
The last big edit will come on Bartus' road home, where rather than going around Jansu (I think initially I was more interested in discovering what it would be like to see his parents again), I want him to pass through it and come face to face with one or more of the villagers he grew up with, where he will be confronted with the "Want" again (feeling not worth much, especially since he failed the apprenticeship). This interaction will give us a resistance point for later, when his father asks him why he can't stay.
I'll keep the discussion with his father largely the same with minor edits, though I might try and squeeze in the first part of Chapter Three into the end here, because it feels like part of the same conversation that I've just broken up. I might just have his dad stick around while he writes stuff down.
And those are my editing plans!
My goal is to finish Chapter Two by June 18, 2024. After that, I'll be dividing my time between smaller edits throughout the book as I start sending pitches again to agents now that the first chapter is in good shape.