On Re-reading My Crazy Novel

So I just finished re-reading The Fire in the Glass, the novel I began during NaNoWriMo 2007 and finished at the end of March 2008. Haven't looked at the 209,000 word monster for a year, so definitely came into it with as fresh a perspective as I think I could possibly have.

Overall, I liked it quite a lot; the concepts, story, and characters are all fairly sound, but it's very much a rough draft and suffers from ailments big and small. Ailments ranging from overly-melodramatic prose and characters crying on every single freaking page (whoops), to plot holes, loose-ends, and middle-of-the-novel-storyline-floundering. Basically it needs some heavy duty take-no-prisoners not-for-the-faint-of-heart editing. My favorite thing (not).

Also, whilst I was reading through, I tallied up all the characters I cruelly knocked off during the course of the novel. I knew it was a lot, but man.

Death Count:

• Secondary Characters—6
• Minor Characters—7
• Specifically Mentioned Soldiers—2
• Unborn Children—2
• Group of Soldiers One—23
• Group of Soldiers Two—300 +
• Undetermined Amount of Soldiers—lots and lots
• Off-screen—7 + 1 cat
• Metaphorical Deaths—3

So that's 347 if you don't count the cat or the metaphorical, plus the Undetermined Amount.

Basically, I kill everyone.

Well. Almost. :-)