No, He Would Not Wait
This is my first novel and it is close to finished. These final reads are different: I have a power I do not usually have as a reader.
Every reader has argued with a book. You follow someone for three hundred pages, you learn how they think, and then they do something you know they would never do. You want to reach into the page and shake them.
You cannot. The book is printed. Whatever they did, they did, and they will do it again every time anyone opens it.
Last week I hit one of those moments in my own manuscript.
In the draft I had, my main character waited for someone else to arrange the thing he needed. I read it and thought: no, he would not wait for that. Most of the fix turned out to be deletion, three lines where the book had quietly apologised for him.
I expected the work to be invention, and most of it is noticing. Then I get to do the thing no reader is allowed to do, which is change what he does.
He was never the one being stupid: he did exactly what I told him to for a year, and it took me that long to notice.