Renata's One Note on Every Draft

Renata reads every review before it goes up, which is a habit that started almost by accident. I used to just hand her my phone and say “does this sound insane” after I’d written something at eleven at night, half convinced I’d lost the thread somewhere in paragraph three. She started actually reading closely instead of just scrolling and nodding, and somewhere in there it turned into a real step in how I write these, not a formality.

She doesn’t play board games, not really, she’ll sit in on Deacon’s table maybe twice a year and mostly enjoys watching everyone argue about a rules interaction more than actually playing. She doesn’t read much hard SF either, her shelf runs toward memoir and the kind of dense nonfiction about the body that comes with working in a clinic. Which is exactly why her one recurring note lands as hard as it does. Every single draft, without fail, she asks some version of the same question: would this make sense to someone who’s never touched this game or read this author before?

I resist this note every single time before I end up taking it. My instinct when I’m deep in a review is to write for the person who already knows what I’m talking about, someone who’s played Spirit Island a dozen times and just wants my specific take on the fear track math, not a primer on what the game even is. Renata’s question forces me to remember that most people reading this haven’t played it a dozen times, some of them haven’t played it at all, and a review that only works for the already-initiated isn’t actually doing its job. Didn’t see this one coming, honestly, but she caught this exact problem in my Schild’s Ladder draft, an early version that assumed you already knew what calendrical rot even was going in, three paragraphs deep before I’d explained anything. I’d read it back myself and not noticed, because of course I hadn’t, I already knew what it meant.

What gets me is that she’s never once tried to talk me into changing an opinion. She doesn’t care if I gave Frosthaven a five or a three, she’s not invested in the rating at all. The only thing she’s ever pushing on is whether a stranger could follow the sentence. It’s a narrower kind of editing than I expected to need from someone outside the hobby entirely, and it turns out to be exactly the kind I needed. I’ve started reading my own drafts now trying to hear her question before she asks it, which mostly means I still miss it and she still catches it, but at least I’m getting faster at fixing it once she does.

I don’t know if she reads this site the way I read the stuff I review, cover to cover, patient with it. But she reads every single draft that closely, every time, and I don’t think this blog would sound like itself without that one recurring question sitting underneath every piece I post.