After receiving a lot of similar feedback, I have made the painful decision to do a significant rewrite of Soul Census, with the goal of removing or at least strategically tweaking the “Spirit World” backstory. The backstory, while essential to understand the events happening in the novel, slow things down and are too much of an info dump for casual readers.
I am going to do need to strategically insert backstory sparingly to not interrupt the flow of the main story. For the things that I end up cutting, I will be adding that to an optional “Epilogue” section. Maybe.
I know this will cut into my time finishing the sequel War of Shadows, but it’s pointless to write a sequel to book that people aren’t finishing anyway. So I need to do this and then pivot back to War of Shadows. I may end up renaming the novel entirely to War of Shadows (Book 1).
Will post further updates as I get through this…