Story Progression

One thing I've come to realize about Mutation is that the story never really felt like it was actually progressing.  The characters remained mostly the same throughout the entire story, either being regular normal mortals or superpowered mutants.  And that makes the story stale; if your characters, especially the main protagonists, never change throughout the course of a story, then the story is boring and doesn't really flow.  Your characters are just doing things but never changing because of the events that happen to them.

The reason I mention this at all is because I've been re-reading the Harry Potter novels.  Yes, I fell to the Harry Potter craze again.  Whatever.  The point is that JK Rowling did a good job of progressing the story as a series.  Nothing moved too fast.  In the first 3 novels the events that happened were relatively safe; you weren't thrust into the second war automatically.  Even in Books 4 and 5 that didn't happen with Voldemort back, because you had the ministry not accepting his return and Voldemort for the most part remaining on the down-low.  Only in books 6 and 7 did you have the real war going on, and as a result those stories were longer, more "epic" per se, and dealt more with simply trying to fight Voldemort.
Additionally, the characters progressed.  They grew up.  They learned new spells and tricks, new ways to combat the problems they were facing.  And they were limited in their abilities, too; they couldn't just do whatever the heck they wanted to from the get-go.  And that's what made Harry Potter great; it was always developing, the characters were always developing, and you felt as if they were real people.

I'll admit, Mutation still doesn't a lot of that kind of progression, which comes with how the story works anyways.  But I think that, by making Rose sort of become the central character of the story, with her trying to learn who she is and what the limits to her powers are, will help to have at least a little bit of that.  Because, after all, you can't have characters with unlimited powers, which is how I had things going before.
With luck, Mutation will set the foundation for the series of others to come.  I can only hope.

Until next time, (every)one.  Writr, out.