It was somewhere around chapter eight or nine that I learned to write

I finally got through shortening that monstrous chapter seven. If it isn't tight yet, then at least it's tighter. It took a couple of passes or so and at least a week of work, though.

Then I looked through the next couple of chapters, and found some stuff that actually seems pretty good to me. I've felt for some time that my writing by the end of the book was tons better than it was at the beginning, but it was still nice to come to some prose and think, you know, I'm not particularly ashamed of any of this.