Chapter 19

Well, I finished chapter 18. It was critiqued and now I need to finish chapter 19. I can't decide if I am writing with the idea that my reader has the same grasp on the language I do, or if they have the vocabulary of a 5th grader. I am meant to begin working on chapter 19. When chapter 18 finished, the heroine had driven a knife into the chest of the bad guy. Now the question becomes is that it? Is that enough to save herself and heal, or is stabbing him a bad idea, does it have consequences that were unforeseen. It’s a paranormal romance. Vampires and witches and magic unlike the real-world system of paganism and Wicca are being used. She’s a fairly powerful witch in her own right. I just have to figure out if and what kind of consequences, there are. Maybe stabbing him actually sets into motions a backlash from prior interactions, or her own power as a healer jumps into action and fixes the damage she created? The reason the fifth-grader question came up is often during critiques my writing is berated for being complicated, my sentences long. I personally don’t give a crap if my sentences are lengthy. If you can’t figure out what it means then it most likely indicates that you shouldn’t be reading my book in the first place. That isn’t saying that my sentences can’t have grammatical issues, or an extremely long sentence can’t drift away from its original thought and that, that should not be corrected. However, a sentence does not need to be shortened simply because it’s long. It might slow down the story, but if the story is not interesting enough to survive a few verbose sentences, then perhaps it’s not a good enough story.