The non-linearity of this chapter consists in us having Ren re-learn a thing she originally learned in Chapter 18, which we’ve decided to pull out of there and save for here, so that she’ll have more opportunity to react to it. What we have here still isn’t fully developed, I suspect, but I do think it’s in the right place now. (And once again, I’m glad that writing isn’t performance art; we get to revise what we’ve done before you lot ever see it.)

I’ve commented in various places about how this book is kind of terra incognita in a way the previous ones weren’t. The core of what we’d developed in the game can be found in The Liar’s Knot; when drafting The Mask of Mirrors, we knew we were writing our way toward that target. But this book is the onward-rippling consequences of that core, which is in part terrain that the game hasn’t gotten to yet — or if it has, it’s been in the context of plots and characters which are nowhere in this series. Plus there are a couple of long-term conflicts there that the PC version of Ren hasn’t yet gotten to resolve.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying, this chapter contains two events I’m really looking forward to in the game, even as I partially scratch the itch by dealing with the book renditions of those situations. 😀 One is a much-needed revelation; the other is a much-needed ass kicking. It’s nice when people get what’s coming to them . . .

Word count: 168,000
Authorial sadism: Normally I think of this in terms of us being mean to our lead characters, but in this case I should acknowledge that we took what was originally supposed to be mainly a social downfall and made it, uh, extra dramatic.
Authorial amusement: “No wonder you got in the habit of lying.”
BLR quotient: The last stitches of love are bringing the fabric together.

This is probably an incomplete chapter as (non-linearity ahoy!) we need to add a scene into it. Nothing load-bearing in terms of the narrative logic of the plot; we just need a quiet moment between two characters, to address what happened last chapter and set up what’s coming after.

Most of this chapter is character moments, actually, though not all of them are quiet. Really, very few of them are. But if this chapter has a theme, it’s “people have some long-standing issues out with the other people in their lives.” Some of those confrontations end in reconciliation; some really, really don’t. It makes for a nice mix, I hope, and the other reason to add in that extra bit will be to create some space between two scenes that are otherwise a bit similar in their creation of some rifts that have been a long time coming.

Also? Alyc and I are really enjoying the avoidance of toxic masculinity. Whatever issues our male characters may have (and boy howdy do they have some), they aren’t generally rooted in the need to create and defend a certain gendered image of themselves. It’s other aspects of their identity they’re trying to uphold, and those aren’t necessarily incompatible with saying “yeah, I need to talk about what I’m going through.”

Word count: ~159,000
Authorial sadism: We didn’t have to clarify the role that character played in those events. But . . . yeah, we kind of had to.
Authorial amusement: Kind of thin on the ground, honestly, given some of the trauma being unpacked here. We punched the air a couple of times for characters standing up when they needed to, but that’s not the same thing as amusing ourselves.
BLR quotient: The blood was necessary. Sometimes you have to lance a boil before healing can begin.

One of the big challenges with this book is wrangling when to have all the various plot strands resolve. When you’ve got like seven of them in the air, they can’t all come down at once; apart from the fact that it would be far too pat, you’d also wind up shortchanging them all. Nothing would get a chance to have its impact properly felt.

So as we draft this book, we keep having to finesse the timing of the different resolutions. Some of them have been easy; one was a problem we raised at the end of The Liar’s Knot, which for thematic if not causal reasons needed to be dealt with before other things happened, so we could safely stick that midway through this book. But others . . . the plot that wraps up here was first tentatively slated for the conclusion of Part 2. And that would have made a fair bit of sense! Except it felt like that was too early; the reader would, somewhat justifiably, wonder what the heck was supposed to come after it. So we put something else there and pushed this back to Chapter 21, and there’s still six chapters to go after this — which, admittedly, is quite a bit — but there are other plots that will resolve better with this one out of the way, plus one thing that needs room to grow from the consequences. But then we have to put all of those in sequence, and there’s one we kept kicking down the road that we’ve decided we actually need to retrofit into Chapter 16 because it just doesn’t merit a spot in the end-of-book lineup, plus one we put into the end of Part 2 wound up not having room to breathe so we dragged it out of there and put it in a chapter I haven’t blogged about yet, and AUGH.

I feel a bit like I did at the end of writing the Onyx Court series. After four books of scrupulous research and political intrigue, it was a relief to write Lady Trent, with her much more straightforward adventure plots. Whatever we write after this needs fewer complications, more Shit Blowing Up. 😀

Word count: ~153,000
Authorial sadism: There had to be some price to pay. And somebody had to not play ball, or this wouldn’t have felt difficult.
Authorial amusement: By contrast, one person was entirely willing to play ball — and it might not be the one you expect. (Actually, having typed that, I realized I could be referring to two different people.)
BLR quotient: All of ’em together, even if someone winds up bleeding in the end.

I need to step up the pace on the after-the-fact progress blogging if I want to finish this when we finish the book!

Chapter 20 escaped the non-linearity of this particular book’s drafting process mostly by dint of us changing our minds about five minutes before we started writing. We had a plan for the chapter, but it felt a clunky enough that we ended up chucking it. This is a stage of the story where it matters quite a lot where anybody is at any given time, and we had Ren being in Place A, then going to Place B, before going back to Place A for the big thing next chapter, which . . . really just chopped things up in an undesirable way. Combine that with us deciding to scrap a social confrontation we’d originally intended to deal with a certain problem, and it meant I sent Alyc an email literally the morning that we were going to start writing this that was like a thousand words of me thinking with my fingers until I arrived at a new proposal. We had a quick phone call to polish that up into something workable, and then we dove in.

We’re also doing something here which is a little bit tricky to navigate. One of the ongoing plots is, by deliberate design, a thing that isn’t all about our viewpoint characters. It’s absolutely related to what they’re doing, but it’s big enough that having it all be driven by their actions would feel really simplistic and reductionist. So instead we’re trying to go a route where their previous efforts have set stuff up, and their interventions at various points do have an effect, but they aren’t around to see everything, much less to control it. I suspect not all readers will find that satisfying, but . . . sometimes I have an issue with the mentality so common in modern Western fantasy, which Ada Palmer and Jo Walton dissect in this essay, where everything comes down to the actions of a few special people. We’re actively trying to avoid that here, but because reader expectation is often that it’s All About the Heroes, striking the right balance will be an interesting challenge.

Word count: ~146,000
Authorial sadism: Making Ren fail.
Authorial amusement: Off-label uses for numinatria.
BLR quotient: Rhetoric is literally having a shouting match with itself here.

And so Part 3 of Book 3 begins! We’re truly in the home stretch now.

This one is structurally akin to Chapter 13 of The Mask of Mirrors, in that it steps back briefly to show you what’s been happening elsewhere while the set-piece of the previous chapter goes on. Mostly we don’t screw around with the flow of time in the story — that can work just fine in a novel whose plot strands are geographically separated, but when they’re all interacting in one city it would mostly be more confusing than beneficial — but it makes sense when we want to keep an intense focus on one corner of the narrative, and not dilute it with any “meanwhile, back at the ranch” cuts away.

Though there was going to be a cut away at the end of the previous chapter/previous part, whose content has now been relocated to the beginning of this one. We originally thought it would work as a stinger because we were originally going to try and fake the reader out about a certain event. (Actually, since we’re not doing it, I can go ahead and say: we were going to try and make it look like we’d just killed a particular character.) But when we actually got there, we decided the odds that anybody would be successfully faked were low, meaning that maneuver would be nothing more than cheap drama. So we ditched that bit and made a bigger scene that put more focus on the surrounding events, and I think it’s working better overall.

We also had to throw out half a scene because it hinged on the “omg is that character dead???” tension, and since the reader now knows otherwise, it was better to just reorient things in a more direct fashion. Fortunately, the one really cool detail in what we threw out has found a new home in Chapter 20!

Word count: ~139,000
Authorial sadism: Chekhov’s old injury. We didn’t have to lean on that, but we did. Though now that I type that, maybe the prize should go to someone not being consulted on a major decision . . . or the decision itself.
Authorial amusement: Somebody’s taking the plot into their own hands.
BLR quotient: This is the chapter where rhetoric is working overtime to keep blood in check.

The end of Part 2! And another big set-piece, this time of a very different kind. We’re two-thirds of the way through the final book of the series; this is the time on sprockets when we start pulling out all the stops.

If the last chapter featured several emotional moments we’ve been looking forward to since before we even started writing, this chapter features the payoff for a whole slew of plots. Including some the reader may or may not have even noticed were underway — but that’s okay, because when I say “payoff,” I don’t mean this is the end of them. More like all the little, subtle, possibly-unremarked bits come together visibly at last, and we the authors get yell “THANK GOD FINALLY YOU KNOW” and proceed with the effects of that reveal, our sleeves finally empty of cards.

<shoves the nine of spades back inside the cuff>

And it also features the payoff for a thing we didn’t see coming until, like, two chapters previously — the thing I mentioned back in the post for Chapter 16. I said there that it will need finessing; that’s true here, too, in that a key piece of information got lost in the shuffle, and I won’t know until I revise whether it needs to go here or a little bit later. Two pieces of key information, possibly, but I suspect the other one will fit in just fine in a scene slated for Chapter 23.

Word count: ~132,000
Authorial sadism: I want it to be the scene I tagged in our spreadsheet outline as “Following bloodcrumbs,” just because that’s a delightfully horrifying phrase, but it doesn’t actually win the prize. It’s a tie between the machine-gun series of flashbacks, and everybody realizing where they’ve wound up.
Authorial amusement: A certain character justifiably thinking an action of his would have no consequences. Surprise! You’re wrong.
BLR quotient: With the sheer quantity of ideas unfolding here, rhetoric’s got a strong lead. Love is what keeps everybody from losing their shit in the face of that, though.

In which we get to do a big set-piece again! Not that doing so has quite saved us from the non-linearity that’s been such a recurring feature of this drafting process — but in this case there’s nothing truly new we added in, nor anything we removed. There were just two short scenelets whose content we knew and temporarily skipped over in writing, and we had to rejigger the final scene because the staging of it really wasn’t working the way we wanted.

. . . please disregard the bit where we might rejigger that final scene again because there’s a plot beat we need to get somewhere into the final portions of this book, and if we don’t find a good place for it elsewhere, then this might be the best spot for it.

All of that notwithstanding: this chapter is so satisfying, y’all. It features several moments we’ve been building toward since literally before we began writing the first book. And for once, they’re not even horrible moments! Sure, some people wind up crying, but it’s good tears. The sort born of grace from an unexpected quarter. We need those moments every bit as much as we need the ones that put our characters through the meat grinder.

Word count: ~125,000
Authorial sadism: Scurvy should never be your inspiration for anything.
Authorial amusement: Best. Duel. Ever. (It’s not an actual duel.)
BLR quotient: Love. There’s just no contest this time.

. . . is this an intact chapter? One that had nothing pulled out of it, nothing stuffed into it, nothing so much as rearranged?

By god, I think it is.

And a chapter with a nice, coherent through-line, too. While each scene point at a different bit of plot — this isn’t one of those chapters which focuses on some big set-piece — they share an important thematic strand. Which leads to some really satisfying emotional stuff . . . though I’m not going to pretend all of the emotions in question are good.

In part because, while the vast majority of our large-scale plot is stuff we planned from very early on (in some cases, before we even started writing the first book), there’s one thing we literally cooked up about a week before we wrote this chapter. We’ll need to do some finessing on things earlier in this book to seed it properly, since it changes our perception of one character’s backstory, but the payoff should be great

(And by “great” I mean “kinda horrible.”)

Word count: ~117,000
Authorial sadism: The aforementioned addition. We took someone who’s fundamentally dishonest . . . and we gave them just a tiny sliver of painful truth.
Authorial amusement: “Oh, fuck [redacted].”
BLR quotient: Like a key change, we slide smoothly from love into a pit of blood.

Aaaaaand back we go to the non-linearity. This chapter was written weeks ago — mostly — except for the scene Alyc and I added to it last week. There’s a character who’s sort of fallen out of the narrative that we needed to drag back in.

This is one of those places where “how story works” and “how storytelling works” are at odds. This particular character’s absence is significant, a sign of things going on where the reader can’t see. But narratively speaking, that doesn’t work: a character who vanishes from the page is one the reader isn’t thinking about. We had to come up with a reason to drag them away from what they’re doing and into interaction with a viewpoint character, and figuring out the best approach to that required a great deal of thinking. Fortunately, when we finally arrived at the answer, we managed to solve several other (smaller) problems at the same time. I’d noticed when I was revising the scene at the end of this chapter that a particular person was doing very little there (and they person they’d brought along was doing so little, we’d failed to even mention that one’s presence); what we wrote for the insertion gave us good reason to remove both of the superfluous ones from that final scene. It also lets us bring up a particular problem right away, rather than coming up with reasons why the person who knows about it sits on the information straight through Chapter 17. The real reason for the latter was “there just wasn’t any chance to bring it up before then, and even Chapter 17 was a crappy place for that discussion,” so it’s nice to have this elegant of a fix.

Let’s just pretend it didn’t take us about two hours of discussion to come up with it . . .

Word count: ~109,000
Authorial sadism: Putting someone half-drugged and flat on their back in front of the absolute. last. person. they want to see.
Authorial amusement: Somebody getting set down not once but twice with the reality that other people have problems too, y’know.
BLR quotient: Mostly love, since this is mostly about people working together to fix problems. But rhetoric literally delivers a rousing speech at the end.