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I hope the existence if this novel novella is a gedankenexperiment.  To create such a thing would be a labor upon one's own sanity.

I am reminded of the character Wonko The Sane in So Long and Thanks for All The Fish.  Wonko lives Outside The Asylum because he, Wonko, is sane, and wishes to remain so.  Wonko seems a wise man.

What?  And give away the ending? 

In my Amazon review, I opine that the MFA should not be listed among Bird's qualifications because he states, in the firmest terms, that he had to unlearn the biggest lessons the MFA program taught him, and that the whole MFA program was a scam.  'scam' is his word.

What was that lesson?  Write from your heart, gut, or whatever organ you find rewarding.  Bird's lesson from the real world?  You have to write for your audience, in whatever medium.  Implied is that the greatest reward is winning the audience to your story.

We all judge books by their covers, in various ways.  I assert that the suspicions that you have formed, based on the cover, do not represent the book's content.  Only you can test that assertion to your own satisfaction.

I have some thoughts about an edit or two to the most recent chapter.

I think the color in #1 is too dark.  I would try moving the hue of #2 toward #1 without making it as dark or as saturated.  I'm not sure of how to do that with GIMP ... okay, hacked rather badly.

One of the points that covercritics often pounds on is that the cover should be distinctive and (ideally) readable in thumbnail.  Distinctive is the most important, though.

I have to pick what goes in chapter 1.  I want to hold the depth of some of the issues off, because the reader is more quickly grabbed by physical jeopardy once the reader has found a character to identify with.  I can't tell the whole story in the first three pages.

True, but there's a lot happening.  In a sense, that whole book is about the creation of the ensemble.  Besides, Aragorn is mentioned early, in Gandalf's discussion with Frodo before Frodo leaves Bag End.  Maybe you forgot about it--I did, first reading--but it was there.

In this opening chapter, the difficulties of character and ensemble are enmeshed with the tangle of topic and reveal.  Before deciding that the chapter can't hold that much, or the scene can't hold that much, let's make sure that we've packed things into it in the best way.

Now, I've just hit two points en passant.  Second, that you can add scene divisions to cue the reader that there are going to be changes in action and thus topic.  Second, that there are two ensembles and two situations to be established (and arbitrary, 'artificial' scene boundaries can help to separate one from the other).

It will help, I think, if inner ensemble is established first, and at least the core of the inner situation.  This is Tommy and his WoB story.  Some parts of the WoB world-building will fall more naturally into the in-the-book adventure, but if the basic premise and basic dilemma are not established first, the reader will be struggling to put them into context.

The 'inner' story about Tommy and his ensemble in the WoB took two entire books to establish.  Since this is the third book in the series, we can't start over.  Nor can we take entire chapters to establish what the continuing reader will already know.  And while we can't--or don't want--to do an In The Previous Episode intro, we need to make the opening few scenes provide that effect.

To make it work for the reader, we have to frame it as a small sub-story, or rather several small sub-stories, each one coherent and each one complete when it's combined with the ones before.  That means, I assert, untangling the topics and grouping them into little stories that reveal, step-by-step, our starting point and launch us forward.

Each sub-story can establish several related facts, and a group of cohesive related facts can be easier to remember than one isolated fact, because it's easier to hold the larger picture if it's self-contained and doesn't leave too many questions for the reader.  You need to leave =some= questions: having named a villian, the reader asks when the villian will appear.  But those don't leave gaps in the reader's understanding.

Okay, I've blathered enough.  Unless there are questions?

Hmm.  I tried that and don't recall View and the new chapter appearing together.  But if it is possible to view it, then a view button for that row on the Publish page seems a small and simple change.

B2 Ch14, now up  is a complete chapter, unlike my other recent struggles.

TOPIC  DRIFT!

Okay, suggestions up, with a big Hope-This-Helps.