This is me jumping on the band wagon. Below is a tidbit from Arrelle...shelved 6 years ago after 5 years of writing/revising/rewriting. Be warned, I shall blast my own writing to shreds after the excerpt! :P

(To know: Arrelle is in hides, kicked out of her homeland. She and Evridon are in a prison cell. Velrehn is Evridon's home, its people enemies to Arrelle's.)

Evridon, though--
"Eh...uh...Arrelle."
Someone was shaking her, Someone quite strong since she felt as weak as a leaf...and that was not a sense she liked. She opened her eyes. Velrehni! Her hand, of instinct reached for her side: nothing. Her back: nothing. Her--an animasl smell returned her to the present.
"Blahk." The Velrehni made a face. "Those really smell."
"I don't trust you."
"Fine. Good. That means you'll remain over there."
She frowned. "You are a fool."
"Is that the best insult you Leccites have? Look, you've no reason to trust me. By Draden, I certainly don't trust you! But those are sad last words. Sad to die plagued by the past."
Arrelle tensed, wondering if somehow he had read her mind...could he have seen...?
"Sad," he continued, "That I haven't overcome it." He rubbed his forehead with an earth-brown palm. "You haven't either, have you?"
She didn't respond. His smile was ironic and directed at nothing in particular. Arrelle found it offensive.

So why is this bad? One, Eesdon's random supposedly "sage" comments throughout are an indication of his one-dimensionality. Through Eesdon the "reader" of this version is supposed to develop a better understanding of Arrelle. Can you tell I meant for them to get together? And see how naive I was about relationships? I think that exudes from their dynamic...Eesdon slowly guides Arrelle through her own dark places and forces her to deal with life because he knows so much better.

BS. WTF. Why does Eesdon know better? Because he was on the streets for a few years? Because he's male? What was I thinking? Clearly I had no idea what the meaning of "a relationship is a partnership," meant.

Eesdon and Dayis guide Arrelle differently, toward different truths. This, to my current sensibilities, is too simplistic. Real people are not devices to assist the growth of your heroine/hero. So this sort of character building is unrealistic. Though it does highlight my emphasis on structure. Everything feeds plot :P Stupid plot-driven tendencies.

On the sentence level...too many adverbs, unwieldy sentences and an over dependence on dialogue. Too much information, too little internal dialogue. Too little description. on top of everything, characters know too much. I focused on psychological discovery over real life-changing events...but didn't do enough "explanation." There's a lot telling, too little showing...

And feel free to add anything else to the list! :D