I’m working on a second draft of a project. Going through the first very rough draft, I find:
Mallow sighed. “Aye, there’s cause enough for worry,” she said. “Times like these, with the desert folk stirring and the dragons on the move.
Ignoring the cliche-edness of the sentences in question, my reaction to this was, “Desert folk? What desert folk? There were supposed to be desert folk?” I have no idea what I intended here. Of course, I probably had no idea at the time, either, and just figured the story would tell me when I got there.
Now to figure out if the mistake was Mallow’s (silly Mallow, don’t you know there are no desert folk?) or mine (silly writer, how could you get through an entire draft and forget to include the desert folk?).