James C Gilliam

Took a moment to do some re-revisions to “Of an Art So Deadly.” I can say what a difference Separated Sunrise and this work has been. Sunrise was largely completed a couple years before started publishing the chapters on WordPress. Istarted to serialize the story because of all the changes I had to incorporate: a new main character and change the point of view (originally myself and in first person perspective). While easier, it still took quite a bit of time to complete.  Deadly Arts has been a different sort of beast by itself as I am able to work on the chapters in short snippets of time here and there. This is largely due to the large changes in my life, work, and the environment.

Reading the story again from the beginning, I found numerous errors I should  discovered right off the bat. Again, as with writing, my reviewing and editing time is coming at a premium where I get tired of looking at the exact same paragraph or scene for only a couple hours out of the week before finally saying, its good enough. Granted these were easy fixes, if I were able to spend the time, like with Sunrise, I wouldn’t be discovering a massive plot blunder in the first chapters 15(ish) chapters later.

I really enjoyed the amnesia chapter(s) though. It was an idea I toyed with during highschool. The original story to feature such a segment was similar to that  of “Stranger Than Fiction” (which I thought of first by the way), where the main character “comes-to” several chapters later to find he is being narrated. The main character eventually tracked down the author and ended up wrestling with him. This would’ve been illustrated by numerous interrupted lines and lines of “askfduhgfjkhgbaffuh kefjhgsdf aseseflkuughaskfg” to make it seem that the author was continuing to type the story throughout the melee. Then the next chapter would be Chapter 2 or whereever the amnesia began and the character would continue on the original “missing” story.

Chapter 16 of Deadly Arts is turning into several chapters itself and very interesting I might add. I look forward to sharing those twists and turns with you soon.