I wasn't going to do this...I really wasn't.

I'm almost done with my reread of Act Four. When I set out to do this, I wanted to do two things. One was to see how the story read as an actual novel instead of a series of blog posts and it holds up pretty well. Two was to catch various editing errors: grammar, spelling, and places where the text was just awkward and clunky.

I was not doing this to find plot holes or errors in the story. I was not planning to do any major rewrites at all. I was going to let the story stand as is, warts and all. But now I've stumbled onto errors that I feel need addressing, that I can't ignore. And by opening this door, I'm not sure if I'm going to stop.

Error #1 is pretty minor. There's a throwaway line from Solomon somewhere in Act Four where he talks about how surprised everyone was at Mathias' obsession over Deborah. Given that the story up until then does a very good job of establishing what an open secret Mathias' perversions are, that's a pretty glaring error. But correcting it is easy. It's one line. Fix it or remove it and we're done.

Error #2 is not so simple and it's one of the great unanswered questions of VbN. Why does Cranston spare Sarah instead of killing her? This suffers a bit from the same critique I made of Act Two in the first of these posts: something happens because the plot demands it so, not because it's logical or rational. Sarah has to be alive to go to Philadelphia, but she doesn't follow Michael back to Blacksburg. Therefore...Cranston has to "kill" her, but not really. I can live with the fact that this mimics Rebecca's fate in Act Two (She's dead, but she really isn't.) But that had an explanation behind it with The Djinn's scheming. Sarah's removal from the picture does not.

I do have a way to explain this, but it'll require a rewrite of a pivotal scene in PbN Act Two. Since that's still a work in progress, maybe that isn't so bad.

Error #3 is somewhere in the middle. There's a conversation between Deborah and Rebecca and a later internal monologue in Rebecca that is much more negative towards Michael than it should be. It makes Rebecca's later forgiveness and embrace of Michael in PbN somewhat jarring. Those passages should be more ambivalent, written in such a way that makes you wonder how Rebecca will truly react when she meets Michael again. As it stands, you'd expect something completely different than what happens.

So what am I going to do about this? I've got some time this afternoon to work on some of these and it's actually kind of nice that I do have time to dedicate to the story again. I'll probably take advantage and do some rewriting. I know I said I wouldn't, but hopefully I can find a way to remedy this.