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@morreafirebird, Thanks! Much appreciated.

@kelly-lundgren, Thanks for the read-through and your comments. I see exactly what you’re talking about on 2, 3, and 4. The middle part with Heino and the food was a rewrite from an earlier draft, but with much of the original material excised.

With the battle scene, I agree with you on the overly swift conclusion. The story is very front-loaded, and I would like that to change, give some more time to let Myrrha’s powers be defined, develop the villagers (and in doing so, show how Myrrha is used to being treated), and allow Myrrha’s despair to play out long enough for her sudden pivot to repentance and hope to make sense.

One of the big challenges in editing this story for the contest is that this story functions as a pretty important part of the canon of my novel, being the introductory story for one of the main characters.

Two questions:

1) Do you think it’s appropriate to modify a story (and its canon) in order to fit it for the contest? I have some alternate endings in mind that might just work for the story in a thematic sense as well as word count, but aren’t the official canon. What I mean by this is that the contest would receive one short story, but the version which (hopefully) ultimately makes it into the published book would be very much different.

2) Are the first 4000 words good, just from a reading perspective? Obviously if the story gets cut down to the first 5000 words, that beginning is going to be even more important.