Revenge of the Return of the Rook and Rose Progress-Blogging

[swan_tower]

Up until now, I haven't been blogging the progress Alyc and I are making through the draft of the third Rook and Rose book. It gets harder to do this sort of thing the further you get into a series; what I can say about the story is always constrained, of course, because I don't want to give wild spoilers, but it gets even more so with subsequent books. When I progress-blogged what became The Mask of Mirrors, I could talk about R-- and D-- and so forth without any of y'all knowing who I meant. Now, even giving an initial means I am at a minimum spoiling that said character is still alive and in the story (since in most cases you'd be able to guess who the letter refers to; we have very little overlap in our central cast), and because you know them all now, you can also read more into even hints of their activity. Assuming, of course, that you've read the first book, which not everybody has -- so spoilers might be not only for The Liar's Knot (out in December!) but for The Mask of Mirrors, too.

But . . . we both enjoy the progress-blogging. Maybe some of you do, too; who knows about that; but it turns out that me reporting on the story is part of what helps us feel like it's a Real Book that will Really Be Out Someday, rather than a chimera that exists only in our heads. And as we go three rounds on the wrestling mat with the many-tentacled kraken of our plot, it turns out we crave that marking of the milestones.

So I'm going to be backtracking to report on our progress with earlier chapters, before catching up to where we are now! Doing it retroactively is a little odd, but then again, it's very nearly the only sensible way to do it, as we've been much less linear this time around. One conversation got kicked to like three different places in the draft before it found its (probably) Forever Home; other chapters have seen us skip over a scene before backtracking to write it. (The bit where we started writing Chapter 8 before touching Chapter 7 is entirely on me and my inability to remember what order our plot is going in. As God is my witness, I thought that bit came next.) Once I catch up to where we are in the draft, hopefully we'll have settled down into less back-and-forth; if not, well, blogging might be more sporadic as I wait for us to really truly finish a chapter and not relocate bits of it elsewhere.

So, Chapter One! Which didn't get rearranged, but did get a significant revision post-drafting on account of us realizing that a) we'd skipped past some stuff we really needed and b) we'd missed the mark a bit tonally with a new character. This is also a short chapter for us -- this book will have more chapters overall, so they each need to be somewhat shorter, and this one is much shorter because there really wasn't structural room to add anything else. That's fine; it buys us leeway to have some later chapters be longer.

For those who are new to the progress-blogging or have forgotten what the standard report at the bottom means, "authorial sadism" is our favorite bit of meanness to the characters, "authorial amusement" is our favorite bit that's mostly about entertaining ourselves (always in service to the story, of course) (okay, usually), and "BLR quotient" measures the relative balance of blood, love, and rhetoric, where blood = conflict and literal violence, love = positive interpersonal relationships, and rhetoric = conceptual stuff and also politics, not that the last one there isn't also sometimes blood.

Word count: 5300
Authorial sadism: A particular chicken coming home to roost, at long last.
Authorial amusement: CHICKEN CUP!!! (An in-joke nobody else will see, as no such thing actually gets mentioned in the text.) Also "now I know why embroidery is outlawed in Ganllech," though that may or may not stay.
BLR quotient: The rhetoric very much has some blood on its claws today.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/RdnSKj)

Comments

wrong poultry but I don't have a chicken icon

[yhlee]

=D YAY CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST! =D I mean, I don't know what this particular chicken is but I have faith. :3

Re: wrong poultry but I don't have a chicken icon

[swan_tower]

Really, we have so many fowl to choose from -- and pretty much all of them will come home to roost eventually! :-)

[raven_cromwell]

OH, I've missed these terribly! and made an embarrassingly enthusiastic noise when seeing the title of this. Not that I am a particularly good spoiler detective, but I love A. making wild guesses that inevitably turn out to be wrong--I thought the wild revolutionary looking for love would be Tess! and then cackled in delight at my own foolishness when Mirror came out--but also being able to look back retrospectively and cackle over all the fun you're having giving us red herrings in your progress reports. (And of course, now that I've read Mirror, I miss! them all, and the blogging makes December feel like less of a wait; next year, though, will be hard! with no book in the pipeline but the final--unless, of course, you get the delightful opportunity to go further in the world and flesh out your we really shouldn't have had an idea pre our series being done plot.)

[swan_tower]

Hee, I'm glad you like them! As for the revolutionary (rot-13'd for spoilers): abcr, gung'f gbgnyyl Vqhfmn, jub jnf n cbbe fjrrg anvir tvey orsber jr pbbxrq hc gur Fgnqarz Naqhfxr fgenaq bs gur cybg naq tnir ure n pbzcyrgr crefbanyvgl genafcynag. Gubhtu fur xrcg ure culfvpny nccrnenapr, orpnhfr jr yvxrq gur pbagenfg orgjrra ure *ybbxvat* fbsg naq npghnyyl orvat n eribyhgvbanel.

We do hope to write more in this world later on! I mean, it would be a pity to build such a detailed setting and then not keep using it. :-)

[sovay]

Also "now I know why embroidery is outlawed in Ganllech," though that may or may not stay.

Keep it, because it sounds like a punch line and I want to know the run-up.

[swan_tower]

It more or less is a punch line -- to what's essentially a worldbuilding joke, and if that isn't Peak Us, I'm not sure what is. :-P