With this, Part One is complete, and the plot has taken center stage at last!

I mean, it’s been present before this. But in a strand here, a strand there; this is the first time the reader gets a good look at the overall shape of it, and how those strands are all going to tangle together throughout this book. Complete with the entrance of a major new character, and some new metaphysical stuff, and you didn’t think we’d spend this book just playing around with our existing toys, did you?

Admittedly, we’re almost forty thousand words into the book. But this is the balancing act of writing intrigue: you can’t present the reader up-front with the problem and the people involved in it; you have to dole that out a few bites at a time. Hopefully in a way that makes the opening courses tasty in their own right, before the main dish arrives. Except that it turns out the opening courses were part of the main dish, so this metaphor doesn’t really work.

Anyway, now we move into Part Two, where both the intrigue and the ridiculous character things we’ve been looking forward to for ages really get rolling. 😀 There will, for the record, be five parts in total — so we’re about 20% done with the draft.

Word count: ~36,000
Authorial sadism: Welcome to your PTSD, R–!
Authorial amusement: “The [redacted] was innocent. Unlike its master.”
BLR quotient: Whole lotta rhetoric, of the sooper sekrit sort. But before that, some very nice love, of several different sorts.

Sarah Rees Brennan (no relation) once said on Twitter that “the second book of a trilogy is for kissing.” Taken in the broader sense of character relationships, not just romantic ones, I think this is very true.

See, the first book of a series has to do a lot of heavy lifting, in terms of setting up the material of the story. It has to introduce characters and setting and conflict, and while it builds relationships, too, there’s only so much room to play around with those. Whereas in the second book, you’ve got a lot of your foundation in place, and now you’re free to dance on it. You can take the existing relationships and complicate them, give them more depth, test them or turn them upside down and shake them to see what falls out.

As you may have guessed based on me bringing this up, that’s a fair bit of what Chapter Four is doing here. Our first scene takes an existing relationship and sticks it into a wildly different context, adding in another character to fuel some interesting interactions over there. Our second and third (which are linked) show you that from another angle, and weave a minor character back into story in ways that show they aren’t as minor as you may have thought. Our fourth takes two people who previously haven’t spoken and puts them together for the first time, with hilarious results. And our fifth goes back to another existing relationship and moves it closer to center stage.

Of course all of this is doing plot work, too. As much as we joke about the eight million fanfics one could write about these characters, ultimately we can’t just coast along writing relationship fluff; there have to be more layers. (If there weren’t, it would take approximately three times as many words to convey all the substance we want to pack into this book. And it ain’t a short book to begin with.) In fact, right now we’re dissatisfied with the last scene of the chapter, because it isn’t quite doing the plot work it needs to — it’s trying, but we never quite fell into the right rhythm. So we’ll fix it later; in the meanwhile, it’s full steam ahead on Chapter 5.

Which will also be the end of Part One. Yes, we have Fun Things planned. 😀

Word count: ~28,000
Authorial sadism: SHOE’S ON THE OTHER FOOT NOW, HOW D’YA LIKE THAT. Actually, multiple shoes on multiple other feet. This is a chapter full of people getting to find out what it’s like to be the other guy.
Authorial amusement: The first appearance of Y– on the scene. Also, someone missing their mark by two inches.
BLR quotient: Love takes the lead! At least in the sense that “love” = “relationships” in this particular system. But in some more conventional senses, too — eventually.

We finished Chapter Three last night. We’re really hitting our stride now: the beginning of a sequel is always a tricky piece of work, balancing reminding the reader of past events against the need to move the story forward, and I expect we’ll do a fair bit of revision on the first two chapters to make them as tight as possible. But now we’ve got some proper momentum . . . and a return to the fun that is banter-y action stuff.

I can already tell that point of view choices are going to be an interesting thing in this book. Last time around, there were certain constraints on who we used for what events, but those are mostly gone now — which means that we decided at the last minute to swap one of the scenes in this chapter to a different viewpoint, which clicked much better for us both. That choice is going to be dictated more by the tradeoffs of “what fun things would this perspective offer us versus that one?,” instead of having to do it one way or another for plot reasons.

Word count: ~22,000
Authorial sadism: “She’s fine now anyway, so what does it matter?”
Authorial amusement: Setting up two perfectly good plans that happen to cancel each other out.
BLR quotient: Why hello there, blood. Both the literal (there’s a fair bit of violence in this chapter, though none of it lethal) and the metaphorical (the consequences of past betrayals).

As I mentioned in the announcement post for Rook and Rose, we’ve already started writing the second book of the trilogy. I haven’t been blogging about it here because it felt weird to discuss the sequel before we could make news of the sale public — and in fact I’ll have to be cautious about what I post on that subject in general, since there’s a greater risk of spoilers. But it was really fun reporting my progress before, so let’s give it another shot!

Don’t expect the pace to be like it was last time, though. There’s a lot of travel interrupting us this time around, and we’re also not going to half-kill ourselves with four straight months of NaNoWriMo-pace writing again.

But for Chapter One . . .

Word count: ~7800
Authorial sadism: Not a lot in this chapter, to be honest. We’re too busy delicately picking our way through the web of exposition to really make our characters suffer yet. But I suppose R– realizing the sheer scale of what she’s gotten herself into counts.
Authorial amusement: The first of many messages left on a balcony.
BLR quotient: No blood yet. Fair bit of rhetoric, though, which (as you may recall) for the purposes of progress-blogging encompasses political maneuvering. And love, too — because in its way, the love is always there.

And for Chapter Two . . .

Word count: ~14,000 (This chapter is currently too short, because we weren’t sure how long it would take us to get through the absolutely necessary material. We’re going to expand it later.)
Authorial sadism: The wrong subject mentioned in front of the wrong person. There’s a lot of both to go around, so this is likely to be a recurring problem . . .
Authorial amusement: A– continues to be one of our favorite characters. Also P–. The world is very glad that the two of them would probably never think to work together; I shudder to imagine what might result.
BLR quotient: Rhetoric is still on top, though it’s getting bloodier. Especially given what R–’s been asked to do.

You may remember that last year Alyc Helms and I fell headfirst down a hole and emerged a few months later with a novel we’d written together, which I blogged about here as “Sekrit Project R&R.”

R&R, my friends, stands for Rook and Rose: the name of the trilogy Orbit Books has just bought from us.

What is it? Epic fantasy. But that sells it short. It has fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, and miracles, and I’m only sorry we didn’t manage to get a giant in there; maybe we can make somebody really tall during editorial revisions? Also the kind of worldbuilding that happens when you let two anthropologists off their leashes. It has a con artist, a vigilante, and capers as flirtation. It has weird dream shit because we love that stuff, yo. It has noble politics and street gangs and deception layered so deep I literally made a color-coded chart at one point about who knew what, which persona of theirs knew it, and whether other people knew they knew it.

It also — and this is important, so remember — has a new name on the cover. Rather than publishing under two names (which is often unwieldy), we are putting this out as M.A. Carrick. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can do so @ma_carrick, and we also have a placeholder website that we’ll be expanding into something very shiny just as soon as we’re not both about to get on planes to Ireland.

Later I will tell you all the story of why that pen name. (Appropriately enough, it involves Ireland!) In the meanwhile, I need to go squee some more. I’ll just leave you with this song, which we posted last year as a teaser for the flavor of the thing we were working on . . .

(Oh, and also? We’ve already started writing book two.)

113 days after we started writing — and one year and twenty-four days after we said, “hey, what do you think of this idea for a novel we could write together?” — the book is done.

Not 100% finished and ready to go, of course. We’ve both done a lot of revision along the way, but there are still things we need to expand on or add in (D—‘s dog appears out of nowhere halfway through the draft), and there are a lot of brackets marking things we need to name: people, districts of the city, cards in the divinatory pattern deck, etc. But you could read it through from beginning to end and there would be no holes, and I don’t expect there to be any major changes to the shape or feel of the story between now and when it does go out. We’ll be refining what we’re doing, not replacing parts of it with something else entirely.

For now, though, we rest. 113 days — not writing every single day, but more days than not, and averaging 1826 words per day across that span, i.e. more than that much on the days we actually wrote. My normal drafting pace is 1000 a day, so I guess this kind of works out to “normal,” just doubled because it’s two people? Except I don’t think that’s how the math works.

Yeah. ima go fall over now.

Word count: 206,347
Authorial sadism: When you pride yourself on your skill as a player, it hurts to realize you’ve been played.
Authorial amusement: It’s a bit like Volkswagon preferring to confess to fraud than be thought incompetent.
BLR quotient: When the blood is over with, rhetoric is there with a mop.

We budgeted two days to write the penultimate, climactic chapter.

We did it in one.

Word count: ~199,000
Authorial sadism: Turning V— into a chew toy.
Authorial amusement: Turning V— into a housemaid. Also, making people step repeatedly on the magical third rail.
BLR quotient: So very much blood. But if it weren’t for love, this all would have gone down in flames.

Ooof.

One down, two to go.

Which is to say: after making our absurd plan to finish the book even more fasterer than we had originally planned (I say “originally” — that was, like, the third or fourth plan after the original original plan), we successfully finished Chapter 22. In which there is more humor than I had necessarily expected for the chapter in which the characters realize just how screwed they are, before they’re in a position to actually fix it. But we had one character high as a kite and getting distracted from telling people what they need to know, and Alyc continues to be good at thinking up vile language for a twelve-year-old to use, and man, you wouldn’t like T— when she’s angry and armed with a knitting needle.

Sunday and Monday, we write the climax. Before then, we need to patch two small holes earlier in the narrative — one a scene that needs to be rewritten to match the later story; the other a small interaction that’s getting added to an existing scene — because Alyc and I share the tic of needing to feel like there aren’t any holes in the draft before we write the end.

And tomorrow we get to take off and play a fun tabletop game, because oy vey do our brains need a break.

But it’s close.

So close.

Word count: ~192,000
Authorial sadism: M— has always been a terrible person, but one of the scenes here is where all masks and gloves come off and you see just how deep that goes.
Authorial amusement: Seriously, O— is the worst. minion. ever.
BLR quotient: Blood’s on top, but really, at this point in the story, the three are all pulling in harness together.

I put my cursor into the window to start typing this post, and my mental jukebox cued up “The Final Countdown.”

. . . which is pretty apt. We have three chapters left, but it doesn’t feel like it, because the avalanche has begun. Shit Went Down in this chapter, and while we have one more to go before the big confrontation, that’s all basically the overture, rather than something separate from the throwdown.

We had a nice, sensible plan for how we were going to approach that. Chapter 21 this week; Chapter 22 next week; Chapter 23 over the weekend (when neither of us have anything else scheduled and could give it two days of our unbroken attention); Ch 24 denouement the week after that, finishing up by the 26th. But, well, you’re getting this post on a Wednesday, because we finished Chapter 21 on Tuesday. And while we have something scheduled for this Saturday, Alyc declared that they could take a day off work. Like, say, Monday.

New plan, much less sensible. Chapter 21 and 22 this week; Chapter 23 Sunday-Monday; denouement next week. Done by the 19th.

We have no sense of self-preservation.

And neither do our characters, because they’re charging headfirst into danger. Allons-y!

Word count: ~182,000
Authorial sadism: Cities are easy to save. Broken hearts? Much harder to deal with. (Also, and much less seriously, making a Big Scary Character sit through a chiding, knowing that the random dude rowing the boat is listening to the whole thing.)
Authorial amusement: G— doing his not-so-subtle best to bail out of a Very Awkward Conversation. (Also, making the Big Scary Character sit through the aforementioned chiding.)
BLR quotient: It’s more or less blood from here on out.

I have to admit, the strain is starting to set in. Not badly so; I’ve written books where I felt completely burned out at one or more points along the way, and I’m not that tired yet. But Alyc and I have written 174K in fifteen weeks — more than 11K per week. Closer to 12. Even for shared work, that’s a lot, and especially so when it’s sustained for such a long period of time.

Especially since I’ve been editing as I go. I’ve done this in the past with other novels — usually when I have a deadline breathing down my neck and need to make sure I’ve got a workable draft very soon after I have a draft at all — and even though revision doesn’t take it out of me the same way drafting does, I think the lack of downtime from thinking about the story starts to get to me. Writing a novel is an endurance sport to begin with, and writing + revising is even more so.

Mind you, I have only myself to blame. No egging on was required to make me sign up for the escalations of “why do only 5K a week when we could do a whole chapter?” and “why do only one chapter when we could do two?” And I don’t actually have to be revising as we go. I’m doing it because I’m so excited about this book that I’m impatient to see it out in the world, and since I can’t do anything to make the submissions process go faster, the only way I can hurry it along is to get the draft ready as soon as possible. All wounds here are self-inflicted. 😛

Fortunately, the end really is in sight. We’ve got four chapters left, but as of this post going live, we’ve already started on 21. We’ll finish that this week, give ourselves a short break, and then it’s a pretty straight run through to the finish line. We may collapse on the other side in a pile of exhaustion, but we’ll have set ourselves a new record in the process!

Word count: ~174,000
Authorial sadism: Putting G— in a conflicted position all chapter long, then making him dig his heart out and present it for someone else’s inspection before they’ll listen to him.
Authorial amusement: “Aren’t you afraid of drowning?” “Only in the metaphorical sense.”
BLR quotient: When blood and rhetoric have a baby, we call that a riot.

You guys . . . can I tell you a secret?

I really like this book.

Which, y’know, ought to be a “duh” kind of thing? Except that by the time I get three-quarters of the way in on most of my novels, I usually hit a point where I’m tired of them. Like I’ve been eating the same meal for three months straight, and no matter how fond of it I was to start, the taste has really palled. But I’ve been catching up on revisions (doing a first-pass polish on earlier chapters, because the back-and-forth nature of our collaboration means both Alyc and I wind up having things we want to tweak), and . . . when you get head-down in the nitty-gritty of a scene, working through the metaphysical math for an important plot event, or trying to figure out how to make a character imply X when they’ve only got like seven percent of the available information on X and additionally have to look like they’re trying not to imply anything, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Revising earlier chapters reminds me the bigger picture is there, and additionally that it contains a lot of awesome stuff. Over here it’s political shenanigans; over there it’s bitchy fencing practice; this corner has the caper and that one has the journey into spiritual woo. We’ve got something for everybody, including all the bits of me that like different things.

And so much of it isn’t standard-issue stuff. Like — let’s see if I can do this without spoilers — for that journey into spiritual woo, the characters have an argument over who ought to be the one to go. Everybody who speaks up has a good reason, because their various agendas are colliding, and the point of view we chose for that scene lets you watch a certain character manipulate the whole thing without telling you why they’re doing it. Which is good enough all on its own . . . but then we layer in our metaphysical worldbuilding, and the character backstory that gives the lies personal depth, and the overarching plot that means the reader should be very worried about what’s going to happen as a result of this, and you wind up with a scene that feels genuinely fresh. (Even to me, and I’ve read more of my own damn work than anybody. But then: this is a collaboration.)

So I’m three-quarters of the way in and when I look back over the road behind us, I still really like it. Partly because this being so large of a book means we’ve got so many different things going on, it’s hard to get bored — but partly because I think it’s damn good.

Which is a good feeling to have, going into the endgame. And I say “endgame” in the full awareness that the home stretch of this book is literally more than half the length of an entire Lady Trent memoir; we’ve got another month’s work ahead of us before we get there, and that’s at our rather high pace of drafting. But I’m in the sort of mood where 50K feels like I can snap my fingers and it’ll be done.

Word count: ~163,000*
Authorial sadism: Bitchy fencing practice means asking on Twitter for suggestions of how somebody can be a jerk with a rapier, and getting all too many good ideas. 😀
Authorial amusement: You’re going to have to explain that again, T—, this time in words of three syllables or fewer. And then convince R— to take some little baby steps along the road to altruism.
BLR quotient: Rhetoric of several different kinds, if I take that to encompass both social politics and intellectual labor. Don’t mind that splash of blood at the end; that’s just to set up the next chapter.

* Anybody who’s comparing numbers might notice this is a big jump from the last post. It isn’t all one chapter; in addition to writing 19, we also backed up to add a scene to Chapter 6, and I finally remembered to include the prologue we wrote a while ago in the wordcount total. Between that and revisions done to flesh out scenes we’d been short-changing in our quest to stay under 200K, there’s a lot of growth that isn’t part of the new chapter.

As I mentioned last week, we’ve slowed down a bit — partly for life reasons, partly because this turned out to be the World’s Longest Chapter despite us relocating one of its major scenes to the next one in line. But with this chapter we’re officially three-quarters of the way through the book, and although rationally I know that what remains is, y’know, a quarter of the book, it really does feel like we’re about a sneeze away from being done.

I did have to sacrifice a bit of structural prettiness recently. We’d originally aimed to have the book divide neatly into quarters, with certain beats being hit at the conclusion of each part, and the end of part three would have mirrored the end of part one in a kind of nifty way. But the actual rhythm of the story needs to take priority over structural prettiness, and so that moment’s been pushed back one chapter, unbalancing the quarters. I spent a couple of minutes side-eyeing the spreadsheet where we track our chapters, wondering if I could talk myself into believing it makes sense to turn Chapter 13 into some kind of “interlude” thing to rebalance the numbering; then we’d resolve a certain plotline at the end of what would become Chapter 15 (it’s currently 16) and put everything back on track to have things break into three- and six-chapter chunks. Except that if we did that we’d have to come up with an additional chapter to fill out the final quarter, so uhhh, no, that doesn’t make sense, and I need to just let go of the tidy structure I had in mind.

Apparently this is what happens to me when I actually outline a book: my OCD tendency starts to rear its head. 😛

Speaking of letting go of things . . . yeah, so, um. That 200K target? That’s not so much a thing anymore. As I put it to Alyc, what used to feel like the authorial equivalent of “I’m going to aim to eat a healthy diet” has recently turned into counting calories, in a way neither of us was happy with. I’ve found myself skimping on description or characters’ reactions to things because I’m trying to keep the chapters within a certain range, and that’s not good for the book. So even though there is some practical merit in staying below 200K — think of it like pricing something at $9.99, because it sounds like much less than $10 — there’s much more merit in giving our scenes the room they need to breathe, so the story winds up feeling rich instead of stripped to the bone.

I don’t think we’ll wind up ballooning absurdly past that goal. But then again, I also originally thought this book was going to be a hundred and fifty thousand words long, so what do I know?

Anyway. This chapter contains a scene that is, in a sense, where the whole idea for the book began, so it was very satisfying to get that down on the page. Caper as both apology and flirtation! It’s how these characters roll.

Word count: ~148,000
Authorial sadism: So there’s this divinatory card deck that plays a role in the story, and instead of engineering layouts to suit our needs, we’ve actually been laying out the cards and writing what we get. This time the deck got SUPER HELPFUL and answered R—‘s question so clearly it would have blown one part of our plot completely out of the water. Our solution to this problem was . . . interesting. And a little painful. >_>
Authorial amusement: The aforementioned caper/apology/flirtation. Not just because flirtation amuses us, but because on my list of narrative kinks is the moment where someone who expects to be hurt instead receives a touch of kindness.
BLR quotient: Another complicated chapter. Despite the flirtation, I think rhetoric wins out in the end; there’s a lot of investigation here, and pinpointing the problem if not yet the solution.

By the (constantly-revised) work schedule Alyc and I have laid out, we now only need to write one chapter a week to finish by our agreed-upon deadline.

I say “only” because that hasn’t really been our pace since about Chapter 5. Once we reached the tipping point that let us map out our plot in more solid detail much further ahead, we started going faster, plowing through about a chapter and a half or even two each week. But it isn’t a bad thing for us to slow down now; we need to backtrack revise a strand of the story to reflect the change we made partway through before we try to write the next stage of the new version, and Chapters 19 and 20 still have a bit of ??? to them, during which we need to make sure we braid our plot together in a tidy fashion. I like the thought of having the draft in a pretty solid state when it’s done, rather than leaving loose threads trailing out all over the place, so there will probably be a fair bit of revision during the next month.

But we’re close, man. So close! (Not really so close. Seven chapters away. But OMG it feels so close.)

We’re alo enjoying a bit of narrative breathing room. The stuff immediately after the halfway point was very tense and packed; now we’re stepping back to let the characters just . . . interact, y’know? Still in ways that further the plot — no scene here is allowed to get away with serving only one purpose — but there’s time for some more bonding before stuff starts blowing up again.

Word count: ~136,000
Authorial sadism: Well, we figured out a reason why nobody has found the thing hidden down in a certain place. And then we figured out a way to make that hint at a revelation that won’t actually be forthcoming until book three. And then there was that whole “I can make you want it” thing . . . (not sexual — creepy in an entirely different way).
Authorial amusement: What I dubbed The Magnificent Lie, as R— figures out a way to salvage her earlier mistakes by building a New! Improved! Edifice of Untruth. Also, S—‘s reaction to an idea R— had.
BLR quotient: Started off on love, detoured through rhetoric, wound up on blood. Very literally.

Now is the time on sprockets where I feel like I am running running running and not getting much of anywhere. The good news is, I’ve written enough novels that I recognize this as a standard part of the process; it happens in every book. And since this one is so long, I can now say with certainty that it isn’t based on wordcount, but rather on where I am in the book. (If this were a Lady Trent novel, the draft would have been complete twenty thousand words ago.) The “running running running” stage begins somewhere after the halfway point, but before the three-quarters mark. It’s just that since this book is so long, I’m going to spend much more time feeling like I’m on a hamster wheel, before I get to round that last corner into the home stretch.

This chapter was interesting because very little of it is from the perspective of our main protagonist, R—. I mentioned in the post for the previous chapter that she was coming apart at the seams; that hits its peak here, so that the characters around her are carrying the ball for a little while. We got to introduce a new pov, which makes me very happy — it’s a character who’s been on stage for most of the book, but we haven’t been in his head before, and his perspective gave us a great angle on what V— is doing here.

Anyway, we are now out of that particular plot pit and enjoying our last stretch of relative calm before things start ‘sploding. Enjoy it while it lasts, folks, because it won’t be for long.

Word count: ~128,000
Authorial sadism: S— being forced to look respectable, and V— dealing with metaphysical stuff that laughs in the face of his usual skill set. (There are actually much worse things in here, but the “authorial sadism” slot is generally reserved for the stuff we enjoy inflicting on the characters.)
Authorial amusement: A penchant for biting. And trying to look lovelorn rather than like you have indigestion. And snoring like a dockworker.
BLR quotient: More love. So much love, amid all the trouble.

Yeah, we wrote another chapter over the weekend.

This is partly because it bugged us both that we didn’t get more done during the week (even though we knew we had multiple good reasons for that), and partly because . . . I really wasn’t good for much else, the past few days. What I thought was a cold turned into a gnarly throat infection, and I spent most of Friday and Saturday following a carefully-scheduled regimen of two different painkillers, warm salt water, herbal tea with honey, and anaesthetic cough drops and throat spray, that left me without much energy for stuff around the house. But the next few scenes were mapped out clearly enough that I could write, and that way I didn’t feel like the time had totally gone down the drain.

This is a very delicate part of the book. Someone has some information, but it needs to be unclear to the reader who has that information, due to the layer cake of lies and obfuscation that is most of our characters’ lives. And we need to make someone behave in ways that will be internally consistent, send one message right now, and be reinterpretable as something else entirely at the end of the book. Plus our main protagonist R— is coming apart at the seams, and while it’s entertaining to make her screw up the steps of the Dishonesty Dance (which she can normally perform in her sleep), we need to make sure those screw-ups are meaningful, without totally blowing the whole plot out of the water.

So, y’know. Nothing complicated to see here. Move along.

Word count: ~119,000
Authorial sadism: Nightmares come true. Well, sort of. I mean, not really. But close enough to that to make R— completely lose what remains of her shit.
Authorial amusement: Surprise deployment of the World’s Gaudiest Spider! And I would be lying if I said the “nightmares come true” thing wasn’t pretty much the high point of this book for us.
BLR quotient: You can’t see it from where you’re standing, but love, all the way.

Various factors (the holiday, my family visiting, me being sick, etc) meant we didn’t do as much this week as we have been lately. I’m reminding myself that this is totally fine: the benchmark Alyc and I set for ourselves at the outset, the “this is a pace we can easily maintain and only if we drop below that threshold do we need to sit down and have a conversation about slacking off” line we agreed on . . . was five thousand words a week. By that metric, we ought to have just hit the 50K mark.

We have nearly 113K words of book. Of which 5400 was written this week.

So yeah. Not our most productive week, but the only reason it feels off is because our average level of productivity has been wildly above what we originally estimated. And we knew going into this that there would be times when illness or other factors would slow us down.

We’ve also done a lot of work in sorting out the back half of the book, threading in a new angle on the main plot to make it a little more complicated and give our heroes more points at which they can intervene. This has involved, among other things, taking a character who used to be a naive innocent looking for love in the wrong place, and turning her into a hardened revolutionary. Still looking for love in the wrong place, mind you, but she’s much less pitiable than before, and much more interesting. But we aren’t really to the meat of that yet; first we have to get through the current crisis. And before that can be resolved, we have to get through the next chapter, which contains a scene we’ve been looking forward to since before we started drafting. 😀

Word count: ~113,000
Authorial sadism: Sometimes it’s the little moments that are the worst. Yeah, yeah, grief and people being supernaturally cursed . . . but the thing I most want to save our characters from is that moment where R— pulls back from V—‘s hand. It isn’t responsible for sending everything wrong, but it certainly doesn’t help.
Authorial amusement: Forgetting to cue Ally #1 to respond to a different signal than Ally #2, with the result that they both come stampeding in to help at the same time.
BLR quotient: See above re: grief and curses. This chapter is not without its love, but right now blood has the upper hand.

Ahahahahah yyyyyyyyeah, so, about that 21-chapter/175K thing . . .

On Tuesday evening Alyc and I sat down to try and fill in our roadmap for the later part of the book. We started at the end, figuring out how we are going to stage our Thrilling Conclusion; then we worked backward from there to figure out what precipitating events that would require. I then looked at our existing outline (which we keep in a handy-dandy spreadsheet), whacked off Chapter 21 for denouement, Chapter 20 for climax, and Chapter 19 for setup, and counted how many scenes we needed to supply before that, in between the things we already knew. Assuming four scenes per chapter (which has been our average, though admittedly that number may rise as the plot moves faster), we needed another twelve or so to fill out our twenty-one chapters.

Our off-the-cuff list of things we needed to have happen filled eight of those twelve, and that’s without giving one of our major characters anything to do or providing any events to make a certain relationship arc grow the way we want it to.

In short: urk.

So, um, yeah, we’ve just gone ahead and bumped that chapter estimate back up to 24 and the wordcount estimate to 200K. That’s actually more book than we can fill right now, but it would mean the novel breaks into four parts of six chapters each (and we even have reasons why six is a numerologically significant number to use), and it gives us room to work in more plot complexity and character depth. We don’t have a full outlne of the remaining book yet — chunks of it say things like “riot goes here” — but since we almost invariably find that we need to add bridging elements between the things we’ve got planned, I don’t think we’ll have trouble filling in the gaps.

It’s an odd way for me to work. I don’t normally outline to any significant degree, much less put together a color-coded spreadsheet. But since we have to consult with each other on where the story is going and balance things like the interleaving of different viewpoints, it’s proved necessary. And since we went into this with a much clearer idea of our story than I often have when I start drafting a book, in some ways you could say we’re just further along the path I normally walk: I know some key events I want to hit, and then work on figuring out how to navigate from one to the next.

Anyway, we didn’t really write two whole chapters this week — just finished two. I wrote the first thousand words or so of Chapter 12 last Friday night, in a fit of inspiration, and Alyc did the same thing with the first scene and (to a lesser extent) the second scene of Chapter 13, which backtracks slightly in time to show what’s happening concurrently with the events of 12. But we’ve hit that point I get to with every book, where the end feels simultaneously SO FAR AWAY and also OMG SO CLOSE. Right now that SO FAR AWAY impulse is the more accurate one; I’ve written whole novels that are shorter than what we estimate lies between us and our conclusion. But when I can see so much of the road ahead, it makes it seem like it’s rushing toward me really fast.

Word count: ~105,000
Authorial sadism: To some extent it’s the same thing as last post, because a goodly chunk of this chapter is the fallout from the things we did there. But a certain character is never going to meet with formal punishment for the things they’ve done wrong, so they’re just going to have to atone via a whacking great burden of guilt.
Authorial amusement: More of this to be had now, thank ghu. I suspect Alyc’s answer is the Plot-Relevant Hookup, but I’m going to go with all the marginal comments they left on a later scene saying things like “liar liar pants on fire” or linking to Valerie from The Princess Bride coming out to scream at Miracle Max.
BLR quotient: There’s still a hell of a lot of blood staining things, courtesy of the previous chapter. But gradually the balance shifts toward love, as certain people are there for each other when they’re most needed, and someone grows a conscience.

After two marathon evenings of writing, we are now — at least in theory — halfway through the book.

During Worldcon I had people asking me how long it’s going to be, which is a simple question with a complicated answer. When we were originally laying out the plot, we tossed down a few key events and more or less arbitrarily declared that they were the one-quarter, one-half, and three-quarter marks. The one-quarter milestone came in at 47K and this one wrapped at 98K, but the original three-quarter mark has been moved to a point that will definitely not be anywhere near 150K. (We’ve added a ticking clock on a certain plot thread, and that event needs to happen before the clock runs out over there.) So right now we’re just kind of guessing. Looking at the scenes we definitely have planned, taking into account the average length of scene up until this point, and realizing we’re going to need to add more scenes than just the ones we’ve got listed . . . the answer I gave people at Worldcon was “175K plus or minus 25K.” Which is, y’know, a rather large margin of error.

But we’re homing in on that 175 or so. That would be approximately twenty-one chapters, which feels like the appropriate ballpark to be looking at. Might be twenty-two; probably won’t be twenty; outside chance it will bounce up to twenty-three, once we actually figure out how the ending is going to go. (Our original estimate was twenty-four.)

Regardless of where it winds up falling in the overall pacing, this was the midpoint in the sense of being where the entire book pivots. All our major plot threads just collided; now our protagonists will realize those things are connected, and have to do something about it before things get worse. We inflicted trauma in wholesale quantities, and dropped a lot of clues. A central character underwent a major change of direction. And there will be very little in the way of leisurely politicking at dances and parties now — everything is moving too fast for that.

Word count: ~98,000
Authorial sadism: This entire chapter.
Authorial amusement: . . . see above? This wasn’t the kind of chapter where we went “tee-hee” over silly things. Our amusement was the sadism, because writers are like that.
BLR quotient: Blood. No contest.