Long Tale Press

It's certainly better. Much, much better in fact. Still some work to do, but this is an admirable revision effort.

Some things still stand out at me, though. Whether these are writing issues or story issues is sometimes hard to tell and you're in a better position to judge.

For instance: the bit about how much Gizzard can say. In the first version, the way you shoved that information into dialogue was classic infodump. You've moved it to narrative, here, which is better but it still sort of jumps out at the reader unannounced. It kind of pounces, as it were. It's still a little infodumpy. But what I noticed was that in the opening paragraphs, you have a great opportunity to work the information into the narrative in a non-infodumpy way:

Clement slept fitfully that night so that when his rooster woke him with a blood-curdling crow at a rose-red splinter of dawn, he threw the covers over his head and groaned.

“Stuff it, Gizzard,” he said, before he realized what that might mean to a farm bird.

“Good one, Master.”

Clement burrowed further beneath the quilt, wondering if perhaps getting Gizzard a cockatiel's larynx and teaching him to talk had been such a great idea. He had an impressive vocabulary, for a bird, but if Gizzard wouldn't listen when he told him to shut up at the crack of dawn, then what was the point?

Nevertheless, Gizzard had woken him to an important day, a day he’d been both excited for and worried over for the past eighty-nine years of his young life, his first voyage into deep space. [...]

That's the difference. You find a way to work it in, at a spot where a character might naturally pause to reflect on the information you want to convey, rather than just putting it out there as a raw, unmitigated fact for the reader to absorb. Information like that doesn't always have to be presented as thoughts, but that is certainly one of the easier ways to do it.

Also, the banter between Clement and Gizzard is great. Readers enjoy that kind of sarcastic interplay between characters, and it's an awful lot of fun to write, too.

Other bits struck me as weird. The business with how much Clement grew and him not being able to see above the carpet didn't make much sense to me. It leaves me very uncertain as to how to interpret what kind of being Clement is. By default, the assumption is that he's human, yet you challenge that assumption at several points in the first chapter without offering much in the way of a concrete alternative until a couple of chapters later. I'm on the fence about whether this is soon enough. It probably is, but something to consider.

I have to say that the premise of Tharr being a lot like Earth, only smaller, doesn't do much for me. Part of it is that the "Parry Hotter" joke wears thin really fast. The first time you use it (Dekenney space center), it's fine, but it gets old REAL fast. The premise itself is not bad, but I think you're overdoing the density of "things which are the same but with a different name".

The last thing I'll mention is the issue of pronoun reference. Namely, you often write yourself into situations where it's not clear anymore who a particular "he," "she," or "it" refers to. I know you're aware of these places because you generally call attention to them by including a parenthetical note as to who it's supposed to be:

...and allowed Twal Sidney to tune in at any time—if he (Twal) weren’t otherwise occupied with more pressing matters...

In my experience, it is always possible (and desireable) to find a different way to handle such sentences, such that you avoid a confusing proliferation of pronouns. Often it means splitting up the sentence into multiple sentences (and the above example is certainly taken from a doozy of a long sentence), which gives you an excuse to re-introduce a name or whatever you need to do to clarify.

Anyway. Overall this is a much, much better re-write. Keep at it!

Sign up for National Novel Writing Month at www.nanowrimo.org; novel writing starts November 1st!

Yoshi97, Thank you for your encouraging words and for recommending THE LITTLE GOOD OLD BOY to others in this community. I wondered if this was a genre I should attempt, as my other novels are literary mainstream adult with first-person POV. I'm glad you feel I have some promise for writing children's fantasy/sci fi; because I have three grandsons; and some day, even if LITTLE GOOD OLD BOY (and its sequel) is never published, they will have my manuscript to read when they're old enough.