3 Key Takeaways: The Crimson Moth by Kristen Cicciarelli

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7352858593185549600

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my three key takeaways from The Crimson Moth by Kristen Cicciarelli. I hope I’m saying that right. If you’ve been looking back in my videos and wondering, did I film a load of these on the same day? Yes, yes I did.

I’m having a good day today, I don’t know what it is. So The Crimson Moth, I literally just finished it last night as of the time of filming this, so while it’s fresh in my mind I wanted to jump on and talk about this and can I just start by admiring my gorgeous Fairyloot edition, which oh I love the artwork so much. Anyway, my first key takeaway is this, you can openly adapt another story and nobody cares.

Nobody cares, in fact it might be a marketing selling point, so fire away. So long as you change enough that it’s not just a direct copy or a rip-off, I think it’s fine. People really like it actually, so this is a take off of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

This isn’t just a direct rip-off, but what she’s done is change the genders of the characters and then also introduce her own magic system. So that makes it unique enough that it pays homage to the original without being a direct rip-off and it’s still fun to read as an original work. Other examples of this that have been really big recently, I think if you read Hurricane Wars it’s very very obvious that it is a Kylo Ren/Rey fan fiction, but again it’s done in such a way that it’s not a direct rip-off, it’s just paying homage and drawing from the source, but the characters are different, the setting is different, there is a magic system that is clearly very different, so it gets away with it.

And on my shelf, I haven’t actually read it yet, but over there somewhere is a Grimm’s Fairy Tale adaptation that is doing the rounds at the minute, so you know they’re everywhere and let’s not forget books that have been popular in the past like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It’s totally fine to do your own take on an existing story, you just have to be clever about it, make sure you’re introducing something new, make sure your take has value, that it’s not just something that is paling in comparison to the original, and make it different enough that there’s still something to enjoy for the reader.

My second key takeaway from this book is to avoid repeating yourself.

So a few times in this book, especially towards the beginning, we get the same details given to us again and again as if we’re being given them for the first time. So one of the examples that stood out the most for me was her friend Verity, who has two sisters that died in the revolution, and at least twice we are told exactly what happened as if we have never heard the story before, so in full detail. And then there’s the third time where she mentions it again, more in passing, but again I was like, oh man, we know this, we know this already.

So trust your readers to remember things. You can allude to things happening again, you know, I’m not saying never mention again that her sisters were killed, you can kind of say, well it makes sense that she’s feeling this way after the way that she lost her sisters, and it does do that a few times, you know, in the book, so that’s fine. What I’m talking about is literally repeating details and telling a story twice, in so much detail that we didn’t need it twice.

So think about that. I think it’s very likely that what happened was during edits, maybe in the first draft the story was only in one place, and as edits were being made, the reference was placed earlier on in the manuscript to introduce that a bit earlier for the reader, and they forgot to edit down the second example. I’m just guessing that that’s probably what happened.

That would make a lot of sense to me. But still, you know, final edit pass, make sure you go through again and spot the places where that has happened, because it’s just a bit annoying for the reader really. I just thought, get on with it, I know.

And trust me – it feels like the author didn’t trust me to keep those details in my head, which is frustrating.

My third key takeaway from The Crimson Moth is keep track of your tenses. So there are a number of times in the book where, because it’s all mostly written in past tense, a little bit of present tense slips in where it shouldn’t be.

So an example is if they say something like, is this what it’s like to be in love? Rune didn’t know. That’s not in agreement. If the passage that you’re working on is written in past tense, then questions like that should be in past tense as well.

So you must make sure that your tenses agree throughout the whole book, even when you’re doing rhetorical questions, when you’re talking about the future. Would it always be like this? Not, is it always going to be like this? Just make sure that you keep to past tense. Again, this is something that could have been caught with a really good editor.

As I’ve discussed many times in my other videos, editing is not really a thing in the traditional publishing industry right now. It’s having a really bad moment. Hopefully there is some resolution to this because it seems like the reputation of traditional publishing is plummeting right now.

And honestly, considering how much the industry is struggling, that is the last thing anyone needs. I will say that it is becoming more important than ever as an author that you fully understand the rules of grammar as they apply to books. And it’s really hard to learn that without just doing it.

I think that I made these kind of mistakes, this tense agreement mistake, when I had my first book published, or even my first few books. I’ve since gone back and fixed it because that’s the beauty of being self-published, is that I can actually go back and change my book files whenever I want, so I’ve fixed those tiny errors. But it’s just something that you should keep in mind, even if you’re going the traditional publishing route, you need to know this so that you can point out when the editor has missed it.

Those are my three key takeaways from The Crimson Moth. Let me know if you noticed anything in this book you’d like to point out, and if there’s any book that’s like this that you would like to recommend that I read next, please let me know and I will do my best to get hold of it.