Lightsong’s Dream

The Lightsong sections received two major upgrades during the last few drafts of the novel. The first was the enhancement of his memories of his dreams. We don’t get to see the dreams, just their effect on him.

In the original draft, these dreams were far less ominous, particularly at the beginning of the book. My agent complained that the book felt like it lacked direction, particularly in the Lightsong sequences, and asked me to find a way to make it more tense. He didn’t care if Lightsong joked; he just wanted to feel a tension underneath. A sense that all was not right.

The dreams came from this. Originally, Lightsong just dreamed about the ship leaving the port. In the later drafts, I added him remembering more in this chapter—the city on fire, the flames causing a red reflection on the ocean.

This actually wasn’t a change to the dream. That’s what I’d intended him to have dreamed; I just originally had him forgetting. I didn’t start getting into the violent dreams until much later in the book, one chapter in particular. But because of Joshua’s requests, I moved the sense of danger up from those later chapters to here to begin foreshadowing earlier.

Lightsong’s Wisecracks

The other major Lightsong revision happened in the form of a humor upgrade. My editor didn’t complain about the same thing as my agent—instead, my editor wanted to laugh more. He wanted more witty lines from Lightsong. I resisted this at first, as I worried that making him too snappy would undermine his internal conflicts. I wanted him to be droll, but not necessarily brilliant.

Eventually, however, my editor prevailed upon me. He was always of the opinion that a few extra witty lines wouldn’t undermine anything. I have to say, I like the lines, and I’m mostly glad to have them. But I do worry about overloading the humor in Lightsong’s chapters, and therefore diluting his internal conflict.