People are allowed to be boring. A character does not have that luxury.
This is important, because even if what's happening on the page isn't objectively exciting, it has to be interesting. Good characters can make a boring scene interesting, just by being there. You can see paint dry through their eyes and still be fascinated by their thoughts, or laugh at their jokes, or enjoy the moment as a resolution for whatever mistakes they made to bring themselves into that situation.
That's the mistake I made with Clarissa. Hopefully I've rectified some of that, and the line edit that I still have to do should improve it more, since the whole story happens through her eyes.
But along with that, I had to make sure every other character in the story, was a character. Thankfully this was a fairly short list of people. (Particularly for me. Every book in the Everburning City has dozens of named characters) This one really only has ten names to know. The Raven Child's six, Clarissa, the Abbess, the Deacon, and Tai'ik.
Making sure the last three are characters is fairly simple, since they're focal points of a single scene, and aren't present in any other. So the next real edit was to ensure I got the characters down. Which meant, first and foremost, solidifying and expanding their backstories a bit. Especially with the themes of the story, it's important to make sure the characters' own lives resonate with the ship's name.
Ravens' Child. Children of unkindness.
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Mercy was, when I first started this editing secession, the least well defined character in the story. Which did her a disservice, since she's probably the most important character for the sake of the ship and the crew.
The Ravens' Child wouldn't exist without Vincent. But the crew wouldn't exist without Mercy.
The trouble with developing her character was that to do so, I also had to develop the Wayfarers as a people further. And I'm lazy.
