Spoilers to follow. If you haven’t read or finished Lambskin yet, I advise you do not read this until you have.

Lambskin is the fastest work I have ever written. Between August 16th and September 16th I wrote just about thirty-nine thousand words. It is also the first work I published serially as I wrote it. As a result, it’s a first draft; I’ve done some spelling and grammar passes on rereads, fixed some awkward wording, but it’s still quite raw. I’d planned for a bit of doing a definitive edition of it, packaged as an e-book as well, however, my experience in the process of that, and my struggle in finishing the epilogues, has made me realize the story has several shortcomings.

Broadly, Lambskin is an internal story, it is told from within Kelsey’s thoughts at a deep level. There are places where this is a hindrance, and others where I think I did not dive deep enough. The speed at which I wrote it, as well as the lack of re-draft passes, also makes for some kinks in the flow. Of particular note to me:

• Kelsey is too innocent for what she is and how she acts. This wasn’t particularly intentional; it just felt like establishing that she has killed or committed specific crimes would complicate things and get in the way. Now that I know the scope of the story, I have an idea for how to address this. Another motivating factor here was the struggle between the facts of the story and the allegory wrapped up in it, and I let my concerns about the allegory win out, when I think it should’ve been the other way around.
• Michaela isn’t as well defined a character as I think she should be. This is a place where I was too inside of Kelsey’s mindset while writing much of the story, and something I intend to fix.
• Kelsey’s creators are ill-defined in their motives and the scope of their action. While not necessarily a problem of the text itself (always better for these things to be mysterious to the reader, in my opinion), it was a problem for me, as the author, as I found myself writing around what should be a central aspect of the world the story is set within.
• All of the above add up to make the ending feel somewhat contrived. Part of the problem here is that I originally imagined Lambskin as a much shorter story. I had the ending in mind, and raced towards it, yet I ended up taking a longer route than I envisioned.
• There’s also a handful of awkward scenes or constructions resulting from the story’s rapid growth. The few paragraphs is one of them; it establishes a malice to Kelsey that doesn’t really bear out, and now I think there are other ways to make a more compelling opening. Then there’s a bit of stumbling over Michaela’s parentage, which was motivated out of my desire to preserve a single line that I thought was funny. The conversation with Michaela’s father is also particularly awkward in my mind, and it wasn’t fun to write, either. I don’t think it’s going to be fun to fix, but I’ll try.
• Some of the world/lore dumps I think can and should be trimmed. At the time my thought was “I’m writing this for fun, fuck it, I’ll find out if this is a mistake” and it appears that in some cases, yes, it was.
• In general there are things I want to address on a craft level; small things that when added together make a difference.

In the end, I’m happy with what Lambskin is, but not content. I aim to make it the best version of itself that it can be; to that end, the changes I do make aren’t going to affect the events, plot, or relations in major ways. Rather, I intend to give it the polish I would’ve given to a story written in a more regular process. This, I think, will let me finish the epilogues in a satisfying way.