Hi guys, its me again, the creator of this world. Aka Slime guy author

Work at my job this week gave me plenty of time to think over the story as written so far. Honestly, I like it, and see the set ups coming together nicely. On the other hand, like the most recent review said, it is a bit of a slow burn huh? Ironic, considering my first edit round decreased the pacing speed, but I actually do agree here. Alongside that, the observation that the other characters don't pop up much besides Emily- this is a part of inspired writing rather than planned writing.

Things to improve: 1. Character usage

I'm happy with Jack and his characterization, but everyone else is either half-baked or underutilized. Part of dark and grimdark is forming connections with other characters for the expected darker events, and I'm not establishing enough emotional connection in the characters.

Solution: I'm creating a word doc devoted to each character, their personality, story relevance, and fate

2. Pacing to the Bureau

Before, Jack met the bureau before chapter 10 and had a large world info dump, too fast. Now, meeting them after chapter 15 with barely any explaining, too slow.

Solution: I'm going to shift events around to increase his exposure earlier. For example, the ghost car happening before the hike. I'm also going to write down each 'event' and organize them into 'arcs' to improve visual clarity of the timeline in my head. The 2 now are 'Set up' and 'Training'.

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3. Story's True Nature

I always planned this to be a dark urban fantasy. However, new ideas and such have poked their way in, and on top of that my usual writing style is more fantastical with a shifting mix of comedy and seriousness depending on the story. This story still hasn't settled into a single genre type yet.

Solution: Determining character fates and arcs will help me solve this. Also reader feedback.

4. Supernatural encounter

I have the opening monster, the ghost, the alley, the tall man, and the barkfolk. Only the ghost and barkfolk have good descriptive sections. If you've been wondering, while I do plan on having traditional monsters, this story is MAINLY going to involve real USA monsters that rarely get to shine in the spotlight.

Solution: I'm slowly putting together a database from research on american monsters.

5. Time

I have things occur over period of time, but I don't take advantage of that nor have I checked how long certain things take. For example: how long to stitched last, and how do the leave the body?

Solution: research, more research.

I'm a visual guy, so writing all this down helps focus my attention on what needs to be done, and I hope it keeps you all informed on what I plan and how I plan to do it. I as always welcome your feedback as I get to work on all this. Given the nature of what needs to be done, I expect I'll be doing some significant editing that will result in a longer and better story than I already I have, since that's how it always goes for me. I expect I'll be adding 1.5x words if not 2x, and that will include parts I outright delete. I won't bug you guys with more than 1 update chapter before I start publishing new chapters again, so look forward to it.