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But by the time of the duel, we've already had the mystery of the containment jar.  Bring that out as you should and Alina becomes the troublemaker who forced them into that mystery, and who also brought Anver and Kat together.  Alina's job is done.  Give her a big payoff (from the action side) and let the clues contintue to accumulate, while bringing the creepy Sil onto the stage.

Think of Alina as the JATO bottle.

Okay, one last set of edits to Pain v. Nightmare.  If you think I broke it, let me know and I'll repub so you can get points for teling me.

No, the way it was framed it had something to do with her newly-granted powers.

Yeah, that part puzzles me.  Was 'puppy' under someone's Veil?  Did he not even know that Alda was with him?

Was the dog-breeding The Defilier's history?

Has The Defiler been that deep that long in the enemy camp?  Could the Order have survived with the Enemy as the Voice?

Oh, these reveals are going to hit the reader like John Dickson Carr's load of bricks through a skylight--or maybe like a flash-bang grenade.

The scoff can be Jaylene's mental reaction.  It can even give half the secret -- "She's not old enough for that.  NOBODY could be."

Yes.  See my  return email.

Declaim means to recite as for an audience, giving all the inflections and intonations appropriate.

Not bad.  Not bad a`tall.

So ... have you looked in on my recent chapterlette for the start of SP/B2?

Amy, you sometimes reply that I think outside your box.  Let's see if I can show you part of mine.

In theater and cinema, the term 'blocking' refers to working out the movement of actors on stage or before the camera, and for cinema, the exact arrangement of shots.  (The scriptwriter will indicate Closeup on Cassius, Wide on Caesar, and sometimes there will be additional notes like Scars visible; but the actual blocking of shots is done by the director, who has a lot of work to do before the shoot.)

Many of my comments have to do with movement and action.  Unless the action is pulling me furiously, I construct the scene in my mind when I read.  Not always in the same detail, but enough to catch many oddities, and those make me look closer to see if I've misread.

On words like 'multiple': I don't read aloud to myself or move my lips when I read, but I do recall the sound-colors and sound-shapes of the words.  Small articles and very common words like 'for', 'to' (when used for the infinitive), and 'of' glide by almost unheard and copulas get only weak notice.

So the sounds and cadences of words matter, even though I read silently.  Somewhere, probably in Manchester's The Last Lion, I read of Churchill being told that to call a policy "both obsolete and reprehensible" (as he had) was meaningless.  It's not, but Churchill's reply was interesting.  He said (paraphrased) 'Listen to the B's'.

The two adjectives are linked by the 'B's and 'P's, labial stops that are sounded hard in those words.  When I hear or read a word like 'multiple' or 'rebarbative' I hear repeated hard-sounded stops.

When a native English speaker (who does not also speak Russian) hears Russian, he hears a multi-car pileup of guttural stops and fricatives.  That's an extreme example, but even in listening to English we pick out the pulse and flow of sound and shape our sense of meaning around it.  Is 'awkward' onomatopoeia?  Not by the standard definition, yet the word does picture the meaning.

That covers all but a handful of comments in my last review.  The others have to do with mental state, and I can't put my reading of moods on the same firm ground as the other comments.

So did you survive my review?

Well, he'd gotten there little by little.  (The text now says 'reached')  The time estimate is an inference from the time w/out sleep.

Okay, I've made some changes to meet your objections.  I'm afraid he'll get out of his predicament altogether too soon.