Rook and Rose Book 3, Chapter 7

[swan_tower]

My sister, speaking of the non-linearity of how we're writing the third volume of this trilogy, dubbed it "an entire book of Chapter 14s," in the sense that by the time we're done, everything in it will probably have been part of Chapter 14 at some point or another. I wound up correcting that to "an entire book of Chapter 7s." Here we have a scene we initially skipped over and back-tracked to write, a conversation that was originally in Chapter 2, a scene we decided to retrofit in when we were in the middle of drafting Chapter 9, a scene that was originally in Chapter 8 before being moved forward, and oh yeah there's the fact that I got turned around and had us writing Chapter 8 before we even started this one, because I forgot what order things went in.

>_<

But hey, it's finally in a complete enough state that I feel like I can report about it! (Well, it was that way several days ago, but I didn't get around to posting until now.) This chapter has a lovely bit of spectacle, but the various adjustments means it also has some important politicking before we get to the spectacle. Revisions mean it now also also has a minor character who's been a constant, low-grade irritant from the start of the series, getting the first of two comeuppances that are coming to them. It also also also has a moment that caused my sister, our alpha reader, to cry "portage feels!," which I suspect is a phrase that has never before been used in the history of the world. :-D

I have given up on pretending that the non-linearity will stop. It just seems to be how this book is going to go.

Word count: ~46,000
Authorial sadism: Someone shared only half of what they know. The rest will come out eventually, but right now, that someone wants their listener to suffer.
Authorial amusement: The aforementioned comeuppance. It's really quite shamelessly delivered.
BLR quotient: Rhetoric in the first half, pivoting through blood to a final note of love.

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

Comments

[raven_cromwell]

Gaaah, I love seeing different people's processes. One of the things that fascinates me about this third one is that so! many folk have talked about their final book in a world/series being really nonlinear, as they're struggling so hard to figure out what elements just have to be there as they close the door on a world or an arc within that world. And yet, nonlinearity doesn't seem to've been something that was nearly this pronounced with either Fate Conspire or Within the Sanctuary of Wings?

I think it was Arkady Martine who recently said something like: with every novel you're writing, what you're actually learning is how to write that particular novel, because all of 'em are so different. Watching you talk about each novel being so different, going from the relative ease of Mirrors to this vastly more complicated beasty makes me think of that. Do you think it's the in-world complexity, reflecting outward to the novels? You've got so much! stuff to tie up and resolve;is the nonlinearity just a product of scale, I wonder. It'd be really interesting to see if anyone's written doorstop fantasy in an entirely linear fashion!

[swan_tower]

And yet, nonlinearity doesn't seem to've been something that was nearly this pronounced with either Fate Conspire

ahahahahahahah <pause for breath> ahahahahahahahah

It wasn't the same kind of non-linearity, but With Fate Conspire was the book that forced me to admit the way I described my process, as writing a fairly clean draft through from start to finish, was no longer true (and hadn't been for a couple of books -- In Ashes Lie can be chalked up to the back-and-forth structure, because it was easier to write all the main sections and then go back and write the days of the Fire, but A Star Shall Fall didn't have that excuse). I did a lot of backtracking in Fate, much of it around figuring out/changing what exactly Nadrett was up to, and also adding in secondary viewpoints when I realized it just wasn't going to work to limit everything to Dead Rick and Eliza.

I'll grant you Sanctuary, though. But the Memoirs were always quite linear in their drafting, because they're also linear in their plots. The complexity and recursiveness of drafting is more likely to happen, at least for me, when it's a book with multiple viewpoints, because then each of them can be pursuing different things that might get adjusted in relation to each other.

going from the relative ease of Mirrors

Yes and no. That one didn't feature as much of rearranging of the plot as this one, it's true. But Alyc and I poured vast amounts of effort into tracking what the characters knew, who knew they knew it, which personas of theirs could admit to knowing it, what the readers knew, etc., and at one point we realized our intrigue had managed to wrap around and stab us in the back like a scorpion's tail (short version: Ren originally gave her name as Arenza during the nightmare, which if you trace it along would mean a certain character would hear that name and recognize it, and that was going to blow open the line of connection to that character, which we really needed not to do -- the solution was that we had to revise so that she didn't give her name).

I didn't discuss that much in the progress blogs, but there was a crap-ton of complexity that took us significant work to wrangle. It's just a different variety than the complexity we face now -- and in some ways there's a direct trade, because back then the secrets we were hiding from the reader constrained what we could show on the page (thus channeling more of the plot through Ren directly), whereas now we have more freedom to let the different strands develop on their own before coming together.

[mrissa]

Bloody chapter 7 solidarity

[swan_tower]

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