Armoth Cycle update

In the last few days, I did a major editing run-through of White Fire, the first book in my Armoth Cycle.  People who've read it pointed out that I have a tendency not to delve into my character's thoughts.  I love my characters and want to bring them to life, so I took this on as a challenge.

In all my previous edits, I had cut words from the manuscript.  The finished first draft was 122,000 words.  Through cutting out extraneous words and redundancy, I reduced that word count to 111,000.  Now I've added about half those words back.  Adding these character thoughts has drastically improved the story, though, so I won't complain about sitting at 116,000.

I think it might be time that I get a few beta readers who don't know me and won't spare my feelings.  While I believe in this story, I have to know what others think.  Admittedly, I use a lot of fantasy tropes, but I feel like I've assembled them into a story I haven't seen before.  On the surface, it's difficult to show how it's different, which is why my query letter has been such a frustrating process.  When I read it, though, I can't think of any other book that has the same plot and feel as mine, and I've read quite a bit of fantasy.

Today, I also resumed work on the third book of the series.  I've been looking back over an old draft of the book, making sure I won't forget anything important.  I actually finished this series a few years ago, but my writing has improved a lot since then, so I'm rewriting the series.  The first book, which I wrote at 15, was terrible, and no amount of editing could salvage it.  I also had no idea about how to use POV, which I have now corrected.

Overall, this has been a fun process, and I can't wait to see this series in print.  If I say it, it will come true.