Robert_Hart
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On Listening
🕑 Added 2020-05-31 03:24:33 +0000 UTCI have received quite a few interesting and insightful comments about Through my Eyes. Again. since posting the final chapter. As I have already revealed, this is my first 'public' attempt at a novel (and the first novel I have ever finished) and there are very clearly some rough edges and dangling threads that require rectification. I have also had several lengthy discussions with a couple of authors whose opinion I greatly value. The upshot of this is that I am embarking on a larger and more detailed review of TMEA than just 'tidying things up'.
I am considerably rewriting the final chapter to provide more detail of what happened to Will after Col and Mutti Frida disappeared in late April 1964. This is already underway and that final chapter is probably going to end up as two chapters.
At the same time, I have two versions of chapter 1 of the sequel under way as I try to work out the best way for the story to unfold. As with TMEA, I have a beginning (well, two - a different one for each version of chapter 1) and a glimmer of an ending through the fog.
And this is a problem I will have to watch carefully, because some of the faults on TMEA are due to the story growing organically - there was almost no planning of any kind. The characters lived in my head and practically wrote the story themselves. For example, whilst Col was German from the beginning and I had a picture of him in my head, it was only during that first conversation with Will in the cedar tree that Col's true nature was revealed. Similarly, Mutti Frida's childhood in various Nazi prisons and then in Ravensbrück concentration camp was only revealed when Col told Will he also feared his father.
One of the criticisms I have received is for that final sentence - but I do not apologise for ending the book there. The more I thought about how to end, that ending was the most appropriate. At the time, I had no sequel planned and yet clearly that ending just about demands one.
And one is now growing.
I clearly have quite a lot to learn about storytelling and for this I apologise to you, my readers: you have been (are being) a tremendous help and for this I freely give thanks to all of you.
So, please keep an eye on my blog, Patreon and discord server for more news as the revision and sequel progress. I do not expect to re-post the revised version for several months, though.
