Giving up the fight

Okay, I get it. I'm a wordy writer; that's just my style. Unfortunately, it makes writing battles tedious or, as one kind reviewer put it, "dull."

Chapter 46, "Bushi no Kokoro" (The Warrior's Heart), has a crapload of fights in it. To add to the confusion, Personas are in this fight. Since I wanted to stay close to the essence of gameplay, I kept the whole you-gotta-smash-your-card-and-say-something-witty technique used in the game. I wonder if that's what's so tedious about them....

Anyway, after the initial reviews, I took out some of the brief fight descriptions, and after the latest review I got, I took out a chunk (about 300 words' worth) of one fight scene in particular. Unfortunately, there need to be enough fight scenes for it to be relatively realistic that the team would feel the brunt of having a mediocre healer, and for the healer in question to feel wasted by the time they got to the eighth floor of the dungeon...and all of the fight scenes need to sort of build off of each other. For example, there's a very brief fight where Kanji uses a new trick and once he has an easy win, he's got this over-confident grin on his face...and then he gets ambushed from behind, and suddenly everybody's hurting. It's meant to be dramatic (well, that's what I was going for, anyway), and I couldn't really leave the first little Kanji fight out before having the Killing Hands come in to fuck everybody up in HP and SP.

It's always a little bit disheartening to see portions of the story that I enjoy get clipped out (or saved for another day), when I really enjoyed writing those sequences in the first place. On the other hand, it's also good to take the criticism and try to figure out where the story can work better for people who read it. (I mean, I lose readers like crazy already...I don't want them to drop the entire story because my fight scenes are mediocre.)

I already knew that fight scenes aren't my forte, and I guess this just sort of proves it. :/

On a high note, though, there's only one (big) fight in the coming chapter (47, which should be up next week on January 13,2010), and then I'm back into a whole crapload of dialogue/emoting, which is something that I do think I do well. "Maturity" (as they call it) also comes back into play shortly, which I'll be glad for...it's been a while since my protagonist had a little bit of downtime.