More Demon King Editing, Verbs Edition

As always, I am destroying past participles left and right. The past perfect tense is almost always understood in English without needing to put some version of “had” everywhere.

I’m going to allow Balthazar to continue to do everything in a characteristically pedestrian manner, but I’ve been doing my best to elevate all of the verbs used to describe Ceres’s actions by at least one degree. Ceres does not “sit down,” for example; she “alights upon.” I’m trying to keep this lowkey, though, because I don’t want it to get obnoxious.

I’m also working on giving Balthazar a more distinctive authorial voice in his chapter heading notes. What I’m aiming for is a needlessly fancy style that borders on purple prose, so I’ve been trying to punch up the verbs he uses in his writing. At the same time, I want to try to straddle a line between his descriptions of Whitespire being ironic and his descriptions of Ceres herself being sincere. This is also something to work on in stages, I think.

Ceres's Plot Arc

Balthazar’s plot arc is simple: he says he will go to a temple and find a magical artifact, and he goes to a temple and finds a magical artifact.

Meanwhile, Ceres begins and ends at the same place, but along the way…

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This summary is much more complicated than the story itself, hopefully. Ceres is not an unreliable viewpoint character, and none of this is supposed to be a mystery. The narrative goal of this intrigue is to set Whitespire up as a battleground while establishing that it is primarily a battleground of relationships and feelings.