Author’s Commentary on Finding Convictions

Did you know that GDocs has a file size and character limit?

Well, I found it for this Arc. For some reason it didn’t kick in until a few chapters from the end, but I ended up having to move somewhere between a third and half the arc to another gdoc to get it to stop complaining at me.

Which takes me to the first comment on the arc: It was long. Very long. Longer than any of the arcs before it and longer than I want to do in the future. It didn’t feel like I had that much to cover when I started; when I was planning it initially, the two threads I had were “heal Jacob” and “defeat the Sterath”, so it sounded like a reasonable set of objectives.

The first level of decomposition also seemed doable: I just needed to deal with getting Katya back with Serenity, heal Jacob, pull Serenity Settlement into the limelight, figure out how to find portals, and deal with the Sterath. On the side I wanted to push the “Decay-thing” plot forward a bit, but that’s scheduled for the next arc (is that a spoiler? Naah, it should be pretty obvious once you read the first chapter of the next arc). The Traa were a bonus that fit in when I was writing, but I’m happy with them since they were a good way to show some of the goals of invaders other than “kill people and take stuff” (which is pretty much what the Hegemon Worms and Sterath wanted).

Okay, that’s a pretty good list - but I still didn’t expect it to take this long. I feel like I should have split it into two arcs. I probably could have repackaged it so that it broke at “healing Jacob”; that’s fairly close to the middle and is a fairly major sub-climax to the arc.

What it really tells me is that I need to be less ambitious for how far I’m going to get in a single arc. One top-level objective is enough.

So naturally I have two for the next Arc. Sigh. One of them is dealing with the Decay-creature and the other is a bit longer-term; they’re connected, but solving one won’t solve the other. I do also have a thread that needs to continue so it can go in the following arc. I think I can fit both of them in the same arc, but if I can’t, I think I will chop the arc at the end of the Decay-creature stuff. To a large extent, it will depend on how well I manage to interweave the two threads. My goal is to handle them both and have them reach their endings at about the same time in the arc, but we’ll see. With luck, it’ll all feel natural and you’ll never know how much of a headache it is to write stuff to a plan where I can’t easily go back and edit things to fit better because they’re already published ;-)

The good news on the other hand is that I covered everything that was in the plan for this Arc. EVERYTHING. It came very close to my overall story plan (though I’ll admit that Tranquil Conviction surprised me a little at the end; I’d expected him to be a bit more vindictive than just stealing a trophy for his wall, even though he does hate the Kaelitha for Reasons that may or may not ever be relevant). We may well see them again, but not until the First Wave is over.

Speaking of which - for those of you who were expecting a giant battle against the Kaelitha Sterath - don’t worry, it’s coming up. It just won’t be humans fighting them. The only reason Serenity was able to pull this off was his knowledge and his Name (not to mention the fact that those let him turn Ita), and he doesn’t have those advantages for all of the invaders. Some of them aren’t going to give up so easily - and many of them don’t have a nearly unguarded portal, either. It’s a good thing Serenity now has a disposable … well, it’s not really an army. Whatever you want to call it.

On that note, the planned title for the next arc is Lost Secrets.

Enjoy!

~Lillene