Oh yes, Dath, forgot to address her. I may have blabbered on FB at some point about how I couldn't decide if she'd been lying to him or not during their initial chat. That's
still a little murky in places, though I eventually chose to write the story such that she is telling the truth for the most part and all of the inconsistencies are her errors or lies-by-omission.
Had I to do it all over again... I'd certainly make her dialogue less
clunky. Hell, I'd make everything before Homeworld Homecoming
way less clunky. (Excuse me while I take the word "was" out back and shoot it dead.)
But I think I'd not touch Dath very much aside from her dialogue. I like that she made a
mistake, made more than one, though I wish I could have showed them happening instead of having her think about them afterward. That's part of the trouble with writing a serial novel over the span of a decade and having new ideas as time progresses. I ended up changing stuff and having to jam it in.
I'd certainly streamline some of her interludes. I'd make more of an effort to show her watching Bug and Hammersteel, slowly learning friendship by example, because a lack of friendship or even proper diplomatic relations is what ends up killing the species. I'd make more of an effort to show
that in particular, especially the ironic bit about how they're all telepaths and can't get along.
And the villains...
If there's one thing,
ONE THING I've learned from writing Desecration, it's this.
You have to plan your villains out first. Villains have to be the most interesting character in the story, and they have to have good motivations. I had good motivations for Render-of-Hearts, though I didn't express them as well as I could. I had only so-so motivations for Kik, and perhaps expressed them too much. (You should have see the original draft of the final mind-battle with her, I kept playing the race card with her like it was made out of lead and could crack tables in half)
To do it over again, I'd certainly spend way more time on the villains, show them more often, re-jigger the plot so they actually
do things every once in a while instead of near the end. That's another reason the pacing was so poor in places, because I didn't have an active driver of the plot--Bug was essentially an archaeologist up to the point he went to Chat-Ka.
That's another reason the pacing was so
great once everyone hit Chat-Ka.
Oh yes, the With Commentary version of Desecration points out most of the movie references.