... a chapter after all

Chapter 19 congealed into a chapter far better than I had hoped, eventually coming together under the title Hosts and Hospitality, which applies to all four plot threads present. It is mostly driven by Sheam and Ghost who have semi-self contained and extremely important adventures which begin and end within the chapter, and are told bit by bit as we switch back and forth between them, with an occasional visit to James and Nightfall, who are both continuing the paths they began at the start of Book 5. Only Jyre is absent from Chapter 19, with part of Ghost's adventure being told from Lytha's point of view, who is with him the entire time. James meets a character often talked about but so far unseen, and helps me make up for all of those cute Ultima Underworld references I had cut from the story. Nightfall on the other hand gives a brief nod to nostalgia with a small touch which hearkens back to the original, in a story that increasingly resembles the original less and less. Sheam meets a collection of minor characters which I suspect many readers did not think they would see again, especially not all within the same chapter. As for Ghost, we may just learn his most closely guarded secret.

Additionally, I solved a problem I was having with James, being that a lack of a personal conflict for the character weakened his integrity as a principal. I have developed that inner conflict, and have evolved his adventure to take full advantage of it. This separates his path even farther from the other principals, which is what was needed, giving him his own set of goals, needs, fears, and possibilities of failure.

Amusingly, sometimes I like to check on the fraction of the entire story each principal represents. I discovered that Jyre, Lytha, Ghost, and Sheam all sit at around 17/16% of the total (in that order from high to low), with Nightfall having a much larger chunk and James a much smaller chuck - but if you average out Nightfall and James, both come to 16.5% ... I wonder how I managed to balance it out so evenly.

... 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.