I recently finished a major improvement pass on Fire Light, Book 1 of Trinity of Mind, that quietly went live today on Amazon.
This is not a new story, and the main plot is still the same, but the book has been tightened, clarified, and improved throughout. The average reader probably wouldn’t notice the difference.
Why? I am a better writer now. It needed it as I am going to start promoting it to a larger audience with ads.
Here are the changes that matter most:
- Tighter writing and pacing
- Reduced the paperback from 387 pages to 361 pages without cutting a single scene.
- Replaced telling with showing without major rewrites.
- Cut useless words and repeated phrases.
- Tightened pacing throughout the book.
- Completed multiple typo and consistency passes.
- Stronger characters
- Improved Jake’s likability and emotional clarity.
- Strengthened Kendra’s presence and importance.
- Clarified Alexis’s dhampir allure and its effect on Jake.
- Improved Jake’s internal conflict between attraction, loyalty, and magic.
- Strengthened the emotional fallout for Jake, Kendra, Luiz, Sis, Dylan, and Jake’s family.
- Clearer magic and supernatural rules
- Clarified O’Brien’s magic, vials, and magical tools.
- Improved the logic around disguise, finding, sunlight, and bones-of-steel magic.
- Clarified the danger level of nightwalkers and vampires.
- Made Alexis’s allure clearer without making her seem intentionally controlling.
- Better continuity and action
- Improved continuity around Jake’s height, weight, strength, and football background.
- Clarified Dylan’s size and role.
- Improved several action scenes for realism and clarity.
- Clarified the motorcycle chase, sniper setup, hospital sequence, funeral sequence, and final act.
- Cleaner reader experience
- Modernized outdated references.
- Reworked jokes and voice lines so the humor lands better.
- Removed or softened language that distracted from the story.
- Made church-related references feel more natural and less explanatory.
- Removed most references to “Mormon” because that term isn’t used anymore. O’Brien uses it once still.
In short: same story, better book, fewer useless words, and overall better experience.
More with Spoilers
Click for more details. Warning: Includes spoilers!
No change was significant, but those who have already read the book might find these changes particularly interesting.
Plot improvements
Improvement 1 – Useless words, Fix passive voice, Rephrasing to show-not-tell, etc.
I removed almost 10,000 useless words.
He grabbed it
with his hand.
The word “just” was used hundreds of times unnecessarily. I only kept it when removing it altered the meaning or feel of the sentence. I just didn’t need to use ‘just’.
The number of times I told the reader that a character looked instead of just looking was embarrassing. Nobody will miss that. 🙂 Similarly, “I thought” followed by the thought, and a dozen more similar useless phrases. Though I kept it when it was mental dialog tags.
Improvement 2 – Did Jake Forget Kendra Too Easily?
Alexis’s allure prevented Jake from thinking about Kendra, but that wasn’t written well enough. I left ambiguity. Either it was Alexis’s allure or Jake was shallow. This pushed some readers to believe Jake was shallow. It is now clear that Lexy’s allure caused him to forget Kendra. Here is the change, on page 151, last page of chapter 24.
“May I?” she asked, putting her hand out for me to take.
I nodded and placed my hand in hers.
Her skin felt cool but not cold. Touching her ignited a desire greater than either her aroma or her looks, and I never wanted to let go. My mind sent out a warning, telling me to jerk my hand away. I dropped all magic.
Think of Kendra.
The girl’s red eyes locked to mine.
Think of . . . who?
I smiled, already lost in her touch.
Then later on page 294, the first page of Chapter 47
Even held at bay, Kendra’s fury that I’d forgotten her was exposed to Alexis, whose mind showed why. Alexis had erased her from my mind with her allure.
Kendra’s fury unleashed as she mentally shouted at Alexis . . .
Improvement 3 – Alexis Removing Her Grandfather’s Necklace
The Vampire King tries to remove Alexis’s necklace with magic. He couldn’t. Later, Alexis easily removed his necklace–she gave her life to do it–but shouldn’t magic have prevented it? Probably. This was a plot hole. Originally, the intent was that magic couldn’t remove the necklace but magic didn’t prevent physical removal. However, that left a weak point that undermined Lexy’s sacrifice. Now, Alexis uses Jake’s special mass-to-magic conversion power to erase a link in the chain. This makes the Trinity of Mind more important because Lexy couldn’t have removed the chain without it.
My eyes fixed on Lexy, who had darted toward her grandfather with open arms. The Vampire King, still fighting off my magic missile, snarled and stuck out his long dagger. Lexy continued forward and draped her arms around his neck. One with her mind, I felt the blade slide through her as if it had pierced my chest—my heart.
Lexy hugged her grandfather as if holding herself up. His cheeks raised, changing his snarl into a smile, and his black eyes sparked red in pleasure.
“And. Thus. It. Ends!” he forced each word out, dampening her ear with his spit.
He held her a moment. His countenance softened, but his smile remained. His fangs retreated as he stroked down Lexy’s bald scalp and neck with one clawed hand, then gripped her between the shoulder blades as if he was just an ordinary grandfather hugging his granddaughter, except his smile held no sweetness, no love. He couldn’t hide the pleasure of finally killing his unwanted granddaughter.
The embrace lasted a few seconds as the life drifted from Lexy’s body.
I felt Lexy pull on my magic. Why?
Then the Vampire King pushed her away, leaving the blade in her chest. As she fell backward, she gripped his necklace of enchanted stones and pulled it from his neck. When she landed on her back, the necklace slipped from her fingers, and the crystals clattered against the floor. One link next to the clasp was missing.
Lexy had used me to convert the link to magic and free the necklace.
His smile dropped.
My breath caught.
Lexy’s dead.
I looked up as the Vampire King’s pupils turned white, the rotten smell of fear clouding the room. He bent to reach like Gollum for his precious crystals, but a shotgun blast rang out painfully in my ears, the pellets slamming into the Vampire King and knocking him back a step.
Improvement 4 – The initial Trinity of Mind mental joining scene took too long
Right while the Vampire King is drinking from O’Brien, Jake forms the Trinity of Mind with Kendra and Alexis. There is a collision of minds. The thoughts go on for a few pages. Readers felt that this was weak, especially while O’Brien was getting drained, like the urgency to save O’Brien was lacking. How do I keep the shock of three minds joining but not diminishing the urgency to save O’Brien?
On page 294, the first page of Chapter 47, it says:
Our thoughts moved at sub-second speeds.
Then on the next page, I clarified:
Our mental conversation had taken barely a few seconds. It took them another two seconds to soften their minds against each other so we could plan. Their spite for each other only dimmed, but that was enough for our rapid thoughts to move with urgency.
We shared all our magic so any of us could use it, but we only needed Alexis to use it. Her mind opened even more to me. What I found there collided with my hatred of her like a tsunami and carried it away. But I had no time to explore it while the Vampire King continued to suck O’Brien’s life away. Lexy and I would have to talk later, even if that idea infuriated Kendra.
Page 296, I add:
Let’s power up! I thought to them. O’Brien needs us to hurry!
Then on page 297, I clarify again:
It seemed like we’d been conversing in our minds for ten minutes, but barely thirty seconds had passed. The Vampire King could not have drained O’Brien yet.
“Dæg leoht,” Lexy whispered. It wasn’t the ball of sunlight spell she’d hurled at the nightwalker. Instead, she cast a more expansive spell, one that would illuminate the entire room.
Daylight.
By cutting unnecessary words and phrases, this section was shorter but still multiple pages. Now, I have beats that remind the reader of the speed of thought and the urgency. This is fast mental communication. I might not work for all readers, but it should help many of them.
This is not an exhaustive list of changes, but the rest are hopefully insignificant. The goal is for higher Amazon (4.2) and Goodreads (3.9) star ratings over time, which will lead to higher read-through for the series and make my work on book 4 more valuable.
