Sky Woman: Book One of The Empress Saga

CHANGELOG

After a lot of consideration, I've decided that "Sky Woman" will stay posted online indefinitely. I believe the next books in the series will still come down once their published versions are released, but I want to at least have the first book available for free even if it's in this rougher version of the story. Also, I first got into reading Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere books because I chanced upon "Mistborn: The Final Empire" while it was being offered for free on Kindle. That free eBook led to me preordering every dang Cosmere story that flows from that man's fingers, so I want to do the same. (Also, read the Cosmere books and geek out with me over them. Oh my lord, they're the absolute best!)

So, the point of this appendix of sorts is to present the differences between this online version of "Sky Woman" and the published one. After some extensive beta reading and more edit passes than I can remember, there wound up being quite a few differences. All for the better, I like to think.

In no particular order, they are...

CHARACTER CHANGES

Enfri didn't see much significant change, but there was some. Most prominent is the issue of her racial identity. It should've always been apparent that Enfri's biracial, but that wasn't as important a part of her character in the online version as it warrants being. A common subject brought up by beta readers was how quickly Enfri accepted the fact that she was Aleesh and how she readily identified with this group of people she'd never heard of up until then. This got a lot of attention for the rewrite. While she still accepts that she is half-Aleesh, she clings more stubbornly to the idea that she was raised in Althandor. "She may have been half Aleesh, but she was more than half Althandi" becomes the foundation of her identity before everything goes sideways. Her picture of who she is then takes a big hit once the royal assassins start trying to kill her and she begins to resent the Althandi half of herself. As the chase into the desert goes on, she grows more attached to this idea she holds of who the Aleesh were. When she finally reaches Marwin, she considers it a homecoming, and then that new identity is devastated once she learns the truth of the Empire of Scales. She is left feeling lost about who she actually is, and that leads her to cling harder to the part of her identity she feels she can control, that of being a healer. This part of her journey doesn't end with the book, and I intend it to continue into the "Rune Knight" rewrite. If you've read Books 2 and 3, I'm sure you can guess what spooky fellas showing up will get her contemplating her heritage again.

Additionally, Enfri's disability got some more attention. One of the worries I had from posting this in the first place was that magically healing her back at the end would devalue her ever having a disability in the first place. That always struck me as ableist and not what I would want to convey. Instead, I put more focus on how she devalues herself for the disability to begin with-- her mother's influence there-- and as her journey progresses, she begins to see it as something that has made her stronger and able to survive what she's going through. Then once it's gone, it comes as a more earned relief because she's already worked hard to overcome it by her own means. And being healed, getting released from having to struggle against it any longer, is the final straw before she falls hopelessly in love with...

Jin. Jin got more work done than any other aspect of the book. There's a lot in this online version I'm just not happy with regarding the romantic subplot. Part of the problem with this version is that I actually didn't intend for them to end up together when I started. I expected them to stay enemies all the way until Book 5. Clearly, that is no longer the case and some hefty redrafts of the series outline were in order. As a result of that change of intent, there are a mess of relics of a harsher, more antagonistic Jin that just doesn't fit the character of a buff-femme sword-lesbian assassin who more or less elopes with her target. So, on to what's different.