My writing style has matured a lot over the past few years. Some of it has just come with age or just reading enough books, I guess, since I pretty much gave up on it for nearly a decade, but some of it has come from actual work. Re-reading professional books with an eye out for techniques such as sentence structure, dialogue, etc. has been super useful, as well as reading some of the more professional-like work here in the furry community. But I still have plenty to learn, and some times there's still nothing better than good ol' studying. So when I stumbled upon what's effectively a modern-era fiction style guide, I jumped at the chance to read it. Turns out it was pretty handy. Now, I don't necessarily agree with every last bit of advice in it, but a lot of it makes sense, and they provide lots of comparisons and examples of how things read if you apply their advice. I've already applied it to my editing pass of Chapter 17 of Merge and it reads a lot better. I may as an exercise go back and redo a random chapter and see how it turns out. If it really does read a lot better, then perhaps once I've finished Book 1 (oh, yes, Merge is the start of a planned trilogy. Never really mentioned that did I. Apparently I decided to go big or go home), I'll go back with new knowledge and redo it all. Again :D

As far as the style guide goes, the book is called "Self Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition" by Renni Browne and Dave King. I got it for like $9 off Amazon for my Kindle app, and already I think it was totally worth the investment as far as my writing goes.