... gestate

Normally when I finish a chapter, no matter how rough it is or now self conscious I feel about it, I send it right off to my critics and await their feedback. This time, on the other hand, I hesitate. I am extra self conscious over this one because, even though the final action of the story is spread over this chapter and the next as well, most of the biggest events of the entire story happen in 22. It has both some of the weirdest stuff and some of the thiefiest stuff in the entire book.

As mentioned in the previous post, I think one of the cooler things is that finally the events described by each principal are directly linked to one another, and what happens to each character and what each character does has a big impact on what is going on with the others (well, with one exception...).

So the plan now is to go over 22 word by word and do a revision, though since I technically am not finished with the 1st draft yet I am not counting it as a revision, merely a continuation of the writing process. Who is keeping track, anyway? In other bad news, the outline for chapter 23 is in pretty rough shape, and my family is expecting out of town company again next week, so I won't have much time to write. Taff!

... this is what they call a climax

Were human hands designed to type 10,000 words in one night? Mine don't seem to happy about it.

Everything seems quite on track. I have about half of what I had planned for 22 written, and am right at the 10K word mark, which is telling me that I'll be able to wrap this story up without going on and on and on like I feared.

22 is being written old-style again, where everything is done in order and I finish a section before going on to the next one. I need to for this one, because much of what happens in one section is built off what happened in the previous one, and helps me decide some things about the next one after it. The widely divergent activities of the six principals over the previous book are beginning to impact one another.

In other news, I moved one section from chapter 20 into chapter 21, because chronologically it happens a few hours into 21. When I first wrote it I felt like it needed to be on "paper" before wrapping up 20, but now that it's been moved it does feel right as part of 21. It more neatly contains Ghost and Lytha's adventure at Soulforge inside Chapter 21 (which is continued in 22) and also lets 20 end with a little more bang.

... about game design

One last note before I resume work on 21. Soulforge is the first in-game location that I did not at least consult and at most follow to exacting detail. Simply put, I find the level design of that mission to be an incomprehensible mess, which bears no relation to any form of sense. Most of T2's level design was very good at giving a "sense of place" as they say in the architecture world. Soulforge felt like a video game level. SO, expect some time spent in those holy halls, but don't expect it to be anything like what it was in the game.

Oh, and I know that the "ending" poll isn't close yet, but I can spoil it by now. The new ending will very much honor the original, but I still intend to keep the fans guessing until the very end.

... each in turn

I discovered that an advantage to having most of the rest of the story planned out (rather than just the next chapter) is that I can change my writing method to skip around. Normally I have a section that I need to write because it's what comes next in the plot, and I don't let myself do anything else until I can get it out... which could take months. What I am doing differently now is that I have six documents, one for each principal, and I keep switching between them. I'll write about a thousand to two thousand words in one, or until I reach the end of a section, and then I'll switch to another character, do the same, and won't return to one of them until I have written something for all six. The only limit on this is Lytha and Ghost, who are sticking together at this point, and some scenes I want to write from Ghost's POV and some from Lytha's, and I don't want to write things out of order. The result is that chapters 19 and 20 are being written at the same time, with 19 more than half done now, and 20 a few thousand words in. I hope to be finished with them both, and thus Book 5, by the end of this week. Book 6 will be the end of the story, and may or may not be four chapters, depending on how much space I need to tell all that needs to be told.

The other method that is working well is moving out to the garage-turned-studio to write, totally isolated from the internet and any distractions. As a bonus, that room has a separate air conditioning system from the rest of the house (the whole house has five air conditioners... yay Florida!) which mean I can make it so much cooler than my own room. Thus, I really like being out there. :)

... on theft, and, technique

One thing that constantly bothers me about both the plot to CoSaS and to COT is that for something with Thief in the title, my characters don't do very much actual stealing. I always wonder how to reconcile this, and always come back to the idea of writing about one of the six principals actually trying to steal something not only doesn't work well with the plot, but is seems like it would be lazy writing. It seems like it would be throwing this deeper into fanficcyness and come off as gamey.

As some of you know, I alternate in my writing style between writing "chapters" and writing "the story". When I write "chapters" I have a particular chunk of the big plot I focus on and it is composed in a mini-arc according to a given theme. When I am writing "the story" there is no mini-arc, just events which play out as they must, without me composing them into a neat chapter-like package that will span 20-25 thousand words. As a result, these tend to go on much longer, sometimes to nearly 40 thousand words, because without the clear arc or theme, I don't know when to stop! What usually happens is that after it's all written, I will edit the content into chapters and then come back in a revision and edit it even more into mini-arcs. Those who were reading the blog months ago may remember when I revised some chapters that didn't seem to work by splitting them into two chapters, maybe at the expense of chronological storytelling. I have a feeling that chapters 19 and 20 are going to be like this. After completing the outline for 19, which was going to focus on James, Sheam, and Ghost, I realised that I had far more in it than will probably fit into one chapter, and that if I went that far ahead with each of those characters, then it will have been too long since we've seen Nightfall and Jyre (Lytha is with Ghost so it doesn't hurt her as much). The solution? Work on The Story, not on A Chapter, and edit it into Chapters later.