5 Years Ago Today - had issues.

I had my book reviewed by twelve of my beloved beta-readers yesterday. My friends and I sat in a room together and discussed the likes and dislikes in my 354 pages. The heavy, three-hour session tore at my book, and my mind. This, plus four hours of D&D, left me exhausted and a bit twitchy. But the review was so good. One of the major issues brought up, one that plagued my book, was the series of detached scenes. My characters would go someplace, endure a hardship, survive it, and be healed of it. Then they would go on to repeat the cycle, again and again. Different places, different hardships, but in the end of each, the characters would reset, be like they were at the start. What about the emotional or physical consequences for the serious difficulties they endured? Lacking. This is where the influence of D&D has tainted my story. It is a common theme in D&D to have the party of characters go out and kill some evil monsters, take their stuff, then go back to town to heal up and sell the stuff. That’s the scene that regularly gets replayed in the game. It seems that role-playing out any lasting emotional scar is undesirable for players. As healing-up leaves no physical damage at all to a character’s body, all of the stains of past battles can be forgotten. Everything resets, except, perhaps, that the party is slightly improved. In my book, the difficulties get worse and worse, and the party rarely wins, but they have no negative consequence. Their desire seems to be to simply do the right thing. Where is the desperation? Where is the ticking time-bomb? I must work on solutions to this in my book, and, dare I say it, in my game. Another major problem found was the confused, or the lack of, genre. The story is a Dark-Medieval-Fantasy-Romance with touches of eroticism. Where is that section in your local bookstore? Now I understand that I can have aspects of all of these in my story and call it Fantasy, or Romance, but I have gone to lengths to focus on each aspect separate from the over-all story. They should blend together. A ten page section detailing a sex scene should not stand alone from the prior, twelve page battle scene, or the six page dialog about magic that comes after. I’ve got to get away from the short-story mentality that I have held on to. I do not want a collection of short stories. I am used to receiving ten page critiques. People love my action and my characters, ten pages at a time. The whole story at once, however, gave people negative feelings about my characters, some things just didn’t add up. My characters say and do some pretty cool things, besides just fall in love. However, they have few goals and/or fears. They want to fight evil but what about personal, tangible goals? These are not apparent in any of my characters. This seems an easier fix but a desperately needed one. The fact is that my book was not destroyed by the review. The story is sound. It needs a major tweaking, but not a re-write. Nothing that needs to be fixed is fatal to the rest. I am gloriously happy about that.