Revisions and Natsuke's Backstory

The first 3 chapters of Kitsune went from 38 pages to 19 pages. I'm still not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, I knew a lot of stuff needed to be chopped, I just didn't realize I was chopping so much. My husband read through it last night and said he liked the relationship between Kitsu and Natsuke better than it was the first time around. So that's good. But still, when I think about the rest of the novel, and how I'm aiming for this draft to be 110,000 words, but if the rewrite of the whole novel goes the same way chapters 1 - 3 did, that means I'd be chopping the novel to being only 55,000 words.

I've been kind of afraid to read my husband's comments, but I hope they're encouraging. Though he was laughing at some parts, and other parts made him think of Futurama, and one of the deleted scene gags for Supernatural, season 1.

<2 days later.>

My husband left surprisingly few comments on my first 3 chapters, which frightens me more than makes me happy. He said he liked it, but wasn't sure if it was him being biased. Which means I need to find someone else to read it for me. So maybe I'll have to e-mail one of my friends in MN and see if he's not too busy with his own school work to give my writing a proper critique. Not that my husband's was necessarily bad, just that he spent more time enjoying the story and forgetting to critique than he spent critiquing.

I've also come to the realization that I need to write out a crap-load of Natsuke's backstory, or at least figure out the main details. Since Kitsune takes place in the same world as most of my stories, just really far in the future, I've always kind of glossed over the details of when the human world and the supernatural world completely split from each other. Originally, it was all tied into my Hunter series, so I didn't really want to deal with it until I actually sat down to write the series plotline. However, since then, I've realized that this major historical even (for Kitsu's time) has to be separated from all my other modern day stories.

It doesn't help that yesterday while my husband were shopping while not exactly in the mood to shop (since we forgot the money at home), I realized that Natsuke's past-self, who's the major player in the Split, had apparently accumulated so much power that the gods thought he was a risk to their position and power. So naturally, this realization intrigues me, since I never knew his past self was that powerful. Or that one *human* (albeit he's a mage) could pose such a threat to the gods. And so they conspired against him.

I want to find out more. And I sort of need to, but I really need to finish Kitsune, or at least revising chapters 1 - 3 and writing/revising the plot outline and synopsis, before I delve into this. But I'm still pretty excited.