Retroactive progress-blogging continues! I’m glad that a number of you spoke up in the comments to various versions of the previous post to say that you enjoy these things; it helps me feel that it’s worth the contortions to say interesting things without giving spoilers.

Though having looked back at my posts for The Liar’s Knot . . . wow, heh. Should any of you try to slug those against the book itself come December, be aware that if you’re scratching your head and thinking, “I can’t figure out what this is referring to,” that’s probably because what it’s referring to isn’t there anymore. We changed a lot in that book, both in the course of drafting it (e.g. me saying “everything in this chapter focuses on Vargo!” and then later we replaced a scene with one that has nothing to do with him) and during revisions. Other scenes are still in the book . . . but in a different chapter now, oops, good luck tracking that down. When I talk about getting pov in for a character who hasn’t had it in a while, and then the only pov characters in that chapter are ones you see all the time? We rewrote a scene to be from Ren’s viewpoint, because the plot thing that scene was originally doing got beefed up enough in revisions for The Mask of Mirrors that it made what we’d written pointless, so we had to change it to focus on something else more Ren-centric. I make extensive coded references in the posts for Parts IV and V to a narrative strand we kept having to re-wrangle — but because said references are coded, you can’t actually tell that we ripped that entire strand out of the back half of The Liar’s Knot and replaced it with a completely different one. (Though there’s one bit where I talk about how we do something horrible to a character at the end of a chapter, and that’s still true! It’s just, uh, a different horrible thing to a different character.)

I can hope that the same won’t be true with my posts for this book, but I’m not holding my breath. If I’d posted about Chapter 2 as we were writing it, I might have referenced a conversation with C– that leads to a moment we really love with F–. But the conversation with C– isn’t here anymore: we realized that wasn’t as high priority as something else, so we rewrote the back half of that scene to do the more important thing instead. Then we were having trouble with the following scene, until we realized it would be better in a different viewpoint — the same viewpoint as the previous scene, hmmm, do we really want to have two of those back to back? — hang on, given that we pulled the conversation with C– out, is that scene even very useful anymore, especially with the exposition there clunking so hard? Scrap that scene, put the weight it’s pulling into the scene we were having trouble with and do it in that better viewpoint, re-use the opening premise of the scrapped scene in Ch. 4 with a different character showing up, move the C– conversation to Ch. 5, and the later fallout with F– will be in Ch. 7.

Oof.

(Oh, and also: we slotted an additional scene into this chapter as a quick break while writing Ch. 6. Linearity, what’s that?)

I swear, if we do write another book in this setting, it’s gonna be less intrigue-y. And also shorter. So we don’t have to play quite so much of a game of Twister, trying to n-dimensionally pack everything we want to do in the space allotted.

Word count: ~12,000
Authorial sadism: I feel like the sadism was on ourselves with all those changes of plan, but since that’s not what this part of the report is for, let’s go with someone having fun being a bit of a dick to somebody who deserves it.
Authorial amusement: “Would you like to see my collection of Seterin crossroads idols?” (Which are basically herms, not that we come out and say it.)
BLR quotient: I think love wins out, given the number of people we have working together here in various combinations — including scheming behind the back of someone you loathe to save them from the consequences of their situation.