My first step in editing "Atop the Trees, Beneath the Mountains" needs to be a high-level pass where I address all the notes I left for myself.

You know, the sort of thing where I wrote ((future Sara will figure this out)) and then laughed to myself because I got out of puzzling something difficult.

Now I am Future Sara, and I am *real* mad at Past Sara.

A lot of these notes are simply places where I noted possible inconsistencies, though. Using a fantasy conlang means that I get pretty fluent in my own languages, but less-used terms (like names of regions) don't stick in my head as well, and I never want to stop writing to look it up. Is it the Edsa Mountains? Edsha? Edja? Which sound did I end up using for that S? Am I using lo:sa'lvaren rules or Interlingual rules?

In a rough draft of 322,000 words, these kinds of corrections, final decisions, and minor rewrites might be...plodding.

Another to-do in this "phase" of the project is to look at the conlang itself, and the names I chose for characters. I made the conlang of lo:sa'lvaren before I wrote almost anything else, and I designed the language in tandem with worldbuilding. Hence I was making choices about the language based upon an initial set of rules and priorities. I was thinking about things like, how does this language reflect the culture's colonialist ways? How do I use this set of "sounds" that I like from Tolkien/esque conlangs like Quenya in ways that are novel and authentic? I did a lot of generation and regeneration, changing prefixes and suffixes, and etc etc etc. And I use lo:sa'lvaren words fairly freely in the text to describe concepts without a direct obvious parallel in IRL Western culture.

But now I'm getting to the point where this is a Real Book, and Real People are going to read it. The way that the words *look* is different from how they are *pronounced*. I have a great lo:sa'lvaren accent. Nobody else possibly could.

* Do I want the names easier to sound out?
* Should names sound more like common names in my neck of America? Example (not from my book): a fantasy character named Elyja is memorable because a brain easily transposes it to Elijah. A character named I'edasve (which is in my book) is not as memorable.
* Do I want to change or limit diacritics for ease of reading?
* Are all the terms used necessary, or would it be better to use English approximates, or even compound words adequately describing the concept?

To illustrate the kind of decision I haven't yet made, I'm considering the common words xilcadis and sins'os.

Patricians in the Republic hold seats in xilcadise, each of which has a sins'os. A xilcadis is a palace complex including the palace itself, small secondary estates owned by the a'lve|lder of Houses under its purview, and a city where only manumitted Low A'lvar and High A'lvar are allowed to live. A sins'os is a village attached to a xilcadis, a slums, where bonded Low A'lvar live in order to support the xilcadis.

I have used these terms throughout the course of the book, but little is lost if refer to things specifically rather than broadly (palace OR city OR manors). Alternatively, palace-complex as a compound is clearer and easier to remember.

Even if I continue using a conlang word, xilcadis is weird for English speakers to read. It made sense to design the word that way when I was generating the language by my rules. But now do I wanna go back and spot-change it? It doesn't HAVE to follow the rules. If I want, I can do an entirely aesthetic overhaul of lo:sa'lvaren.

Then again, committing to these changes steps away from one of the *other* reasons I designed the language as-such: I wanted it to feel foreign and distancing for readers. I want them to feel very fish-out-of-water with the A'lvar, so that when readers reach other cultures, it's easy to feel a lot cozier by simply making the language *easier*. Still--from an accessibility (and marketing) standpoint, the book starts off among the A'lvar, with their lofty opaque language of strange words, and that is a tough nut to crack.

So yes, that is the phase of editing I am at right now. A 322,000-word book written over three years shouldn't take three years to edit. But. It will be a bit of work.

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