I’m not much of an audiobook listener. The only time audiobooks work for me is when I’m doing something that occupies my hands and immediate attention, but the work is not cognitively demanding enough to occupy most of my brain. Like cleaning. Or highway driving. Otherwise, my mind tends to wander off after a few sentences and I inevitably end up constantly rewinding.

In addition, audiobook production is expensive. The standard minimum SAG-AFTRA union rate to hire a professional narrator is $250 USD per finished hour of audio. More experienced narrators charge significantly more. Pace varies according to the individual narrator and manuscript, but as a general guide, 8,000–10,000 words translates to roughly 1 finished hour of audio. At approximately 115,000 words long, an audiobook of Petition would come in at anywhere between 11.5 and 14 hrs (the final run time is 13 hrs and 43 mins) or $2,875–$3,500 USD. Using today’s exchange rate of 1 AUD = 0.66 USD, that meant the starting price tag to produce an audiobook of Petition came in somewhere around $4,400–$5,300 AUD mark!

…yeah.

If it had not been for: a) the generous 2023 cash grant I received from the Indie Fantasy Fund; and b) a “Hail Mary” source of personal funding that came through last minute, I wouldn’t’ve been able to hire Emily Woo Zeller to narrate Petition.

Needless to say, when I was writing and revising this book, I didn’t really consider how the story would come across when narrated; I was focused on strengthening emotional arcs, eliminating repetitive beats and word choices, and concentrating on the rhythm, prosody, and flow of the prose. Improving those things typically also improves the experience for audiobook listeners—if a sentence reads well on the page, it generally also reads well spoken aloud—except for scenes where the medium of delivery significantly affects how much information can be conveyed in a single line.

Like scenes with high stakes, emotionally charged dialogue.

The core of this chapter is the clash between Rahelu and Lhorne regarding her choice of House, a conflict centered in their differing experiences and worldviews. It’s about 1,660 words long, beginning on page 349 in the retail hardcover and coming to a crux on page 353.

An interesting exercise I like to do when considering whether the balance of a scene is off: I go through the text and highlight with specific, assigned colors to differentiate the various components:

• Dialogue (green): defined as all direct forms of communication between characters, which includes things like telepathy and written letters.
• Action (red): defined as characters acting upon (or being acted upon by) their environment/others, including phenomena like magic and whatever else is directly observable by the viewpoint.
• Introspection (blue): defined as any personal interjections, opinions and/or interpretations of dialogue or action from the viewpoint character.

Here’s what this scene looks like after doing the highlighting exercise:

Note the high proportion of red (action, ~745 words/45%) and blue (introspection, ~425 words/25%) there is relative to the green (dialogue, ~500 words/30%). In the audiobook, the scene runs from 13:05:50 to 13:17:17. Using the proportions from the highlighting exercise as an approximation, it means we’ve effectively got a 4-minute exchange stretched out over nearly 13 minutes. Mostly, that’s due to how prose functions as a medium; dialogue needs to be supplemented with action and introspection in order to convey the fullness of what’s going on in the scene. In film or theatre, however, this would be done through the set design and by the performance of the actor/s.

So what does that mean for audiobooks?

Well, some action and introspection is still necessary, because we don’t have a set and we can’t see the narrator’s facial expressions, body language, and physical actions. We do, however, get character voice, tone, inflection, and more, through the choices the narrator makes in how to deliver a particular line of dialogue (Note 1) which means there are bits of text that no longer serve a purpose, as the non-verbal aspects of the dialogue are all conveyed through the narrator’s performance.

Me, replying to Emily and her audio engineer right after I finished listening to the mastered audio files: Chapter 27, my god. I wish I had written less introspection so my words can stop interrupting Emily’s amazing delivery of the characters’ dialogue.

Here’s a visual with what I wish I would’ve done differently. Yellow highlights are lines that I’d rework or outright delete for narration:

Not a lot I would change—only about ~145 words (less than 9%) or so—but note the increasing amount of words highlighted in yellow as the tension climbs in the third (25/315), fourth (31/370), and final page (67/330) of the scene. I personally think it would have a huge impact on the perceived pacing and flow of the scene when you’re listening, and it’s something I’m definitely keeping in mind for future books.

As to what Rahelu does on the next page right after this scene…

My writing group was not pleased with me:

GODDAMNIT
YOU MADE ME FEEL FEELINGS
I SHIPPED
SO HARD
I HAVE Only one question

How Dare You Greta Thunberg GIFfrom How Dare You GIFs

How Could You Do That To Me Lucifer Morningstar GIFfrom How Could You Do That To Me GIFs

I Trusted You Santamonica Johnson GIFfrom I Trusted You GIFs

Clapping Leonardo Dicaprio GIFfrom Clapping GIFs

Kiss him, dammit!!! KISS HIM!

Barbosa Pirates GIFfrom Barbosa GIFs

She should have KISSED LHORNE DAMMIT!!!!!

Angry Anger GIFfrom Angry GIFs

And if you felt particularly blue-balled, then maybe it’ll make you feel better to know that, ever since, half the time I post in our Discord about struggling with a scene, they now just spam writing advice like this:

Where they kiss, right????

Have them kiss and make up instead

now kiss

they kiss

If anything toss the scenes where they don’t kiss
These heroes better be smooching
Or I may have to write a strongly worded letter to the resonance guild

And memes like this:

More seriously, though, they really go all out to keep me sane. While I was struggling with alpha revisions and showing clear signs of spiralling, Dan Harris kindly took the time to give me some stellar constructive criticism:

Click here for my reaction

Dan is way funnier than I am without even trying.

Truly, my writing group is the best.

By the way, if you enjoyed that and you’d like to check out more of Dan’s work, he’s got an urban fantasy novella series that’s a bit like Men in Black meets Ghostbusters: office comedy edition as well as a series of very British cozy murder mysteries.

Note 1: Totally not the place for me to go into a full rant about why the “but what about accessibility for vision-impaired readers, etc” argument in favor of AI narration doesn’t hold up, but I do feel it’s important to point out the distinction between making something accessible and wanting (dare I say, to the point of entitlement) performance. If you’re interested in my thoughts, I had a longer discussion on the subject with some fellow authors over on JCM Berne’s channel. (return to text)

Some authors are fantastic with endings. Brandon Sanderson is probably one of the most famous examples. Not only is he notorious for the “Sanderlanche” (the part of the book where the pay-offs for all the plot lines invariably collide into one giant climax), because he is such a heavy outliner for his plots, he’s known for speeding up in how fast he writes as he gets closer to the end of the book.

Historically, when Brandon Sanderson is within spitting distance of writing “The End”, he will do a writing marathon and provide live word count updates on his social media. Generally, with every update he posts, his WPH (words per hour) gets higher and higher.

At the time I was writing Petition, Sanderson was writing Defiant, the fourth and final book in his Skyward series. I remember thinking that since so much of Sanderson’s writing techniques work for me, maybe I, too, would speed up when it came to writing the end of the book.

Some stats on how fast I usually draft:

• When I know what I’m doing, I can draft at something like, 900–1,100 WPH.
• When I’m struggling, my WPH tanks to sub-200.
• When I hate everything I’ve written, it goes negative because I keep chucking sentences, paragraphs, and whole scenes into the prose graveyard.

Having written 3 novel-length works at this point, I can say this with confidence: endings are difficult for me. Every single ending was like pulling teeth, to make sure all of the main plot threads resolved satisfactorily while balancing the pacing.

For Petition, writing the ending was difficult because I had already written the emotional climax which happens in Chapter 27, as well as the action climax in Chapter 22, but there were all these unresolved plot threads dangling. Also, since Chapter 23 left you hanging with the open loop about the sloop debt and Rahelu has been a fairly active character thus far, perhaps you expected this chapter to tackle that head on.

It doesn’t really come up though. Chapter 24 is an entire chapter of Rahelu waiting around for things to happen to her—I mean, half the chapter is just reading through her employment offers and contracts!

Was it weird to put those in?

Maybe.

Was it fun for me to write?

Hell, yes. I’ve read so many of these contracts in my life that I could write one in my sleep.

Also employment contracts are really important and you should never, ever sign one without understanding what you’re getting yourself into, because that’ll save you the inevitable heartache of having to get expensive legal advice on what to do when one of those clauses you didn’t read carefully rears its ugly head years down the track.

(Sidebar: Why are the fantasy contracts that get page time always have to be demon summoning contracts? Legal thrillers are a thing. Fantasy legal thrillers would be super cool, I would be into that. Sadly, that’s a concept that will have to go on my “cool book ideas that I am the wrong author for” list.)

Anyway. I think the combination of this chapter not dealing with the obvious plot hook from the previous chapter, combined with Rahelu’s sudden passivity is probably why this chapter will feel the weirdest for most readers. So much of contemporary genre fiction focuses on characters and their agency, to the point where characters who behave passively are criticized as being “bad characters”. It’s a very Western approach to story that I personally find lacking in nuance and depth. Fiction is the lens we use to examine reality, and in reality, possessing “agency” is typically the purview of the privileged and the powerful. Even then, there are some things that cannot simply be overcome with “agency”.

For the most part, I have written Petition using a Western style of narrative with a familiar “go-get-’em!” underdog protagonist. Nobody is like that all the time, though, so viewpoint characters who are generally end up feeling flat.

Anyway, there’s nothing that better encapsulates what it’s like to be an Asian immigrant kid than that bewildered, empty feeling of, “That’s it?”

We spend so much of our lives working towards goals that our parents have set for us, goals that have defined us, deferring everything that might pose a distraction to achieving those goals until when we finally get there—and once we make it, we have no idea what to do next.

We have forgotten why our parents set those goals for us in the first place.

So, with Petitioning concluded and offers in hand, we need to see Rahelu with her family again to bring this full circle. The line that marks the turning point in her conversation with her mother and their relationship—“This Lhorne is not Keshwar and you are not Tsenjhe. Why should you try to live your life as if you were?”—is actually based on something my mother said to me, when I was at a very similar point in my life.

I think this moment between Rahelu and her mother is one of my favorite things that I have written.

Petition is a structurally weird book.

If I were to break down its narrative structure according to the MICE quotient framework, I’d categorize the various plotlines in Petition and their archetypes as follows:

A plot: fantasy job interviews (tournament) <Event>

B plot: stop the creepy cultist murders (murder mystery) <Inquiry>

C plot: Rahelu develops a sense of self-worth (character arc) <Character>

I suppose I should also include the two relationship arcs:

D plot: Rahelu/Lhorne (romantic* arc) <Event**>

E plot: Rahelu/Nheras (rivalry arc) <Event**>

In this book, however, I view the Lhorne and Nheras relationships more as subsets of/beats in Rahelu’s overall character arc, because it’s more about how Rahelu’s feelings towards Lhorne and Nheras change as a result of her sense of self-worth rather than the relationships themselves.

There’s also the cultist arc in the prologue/interlude/epilogue that is part of a larger, series-level storyline:

F plot: Azosh-ek murdering citizens in a creepy cultist ritual <Event>

The way Mary Robinette Kowal teaches the MICE quotient framework, the best way to create a satisfying narrative is to nest your plotlines like HTML code. First, you gradually introduce each arc:

<E> Azosh-ek begins cultist ritual
 <E> Rahelu working on her Petition
  <C> Rahelu believes herself unworthy
   <E> Nheras destroys Rahelu's Petition
    <E> Lhorne pursues Rahelu
     <I> Rahelu and team investigate the murders

Then you’re supposed to close off the arcs in reverse order:

     </I> Rahelu and team catch the cultists
    </E> Rahelu/Lhorne romantic tension resolved
   </E> Rahelu/Nheras rivalry resolved
  </C> Rahelu's realization of self-worth
 </E> Outcome of Rahelu's Petition
</E> Outcome of cultist ritual

I…did not do that.

I consider there to be three climaxes in Petition: one action climax (stopping the cultists in Chapter 22), followed by two emotional climaxes which don’t take place until Chapters 25 and 26). Plotlines are closed off in this order:

     </I> Rahelu and team catch the cultists
    </E> Outcome of Rahelu's Petition
   </C> Rahelu's realization of self-worth
  </E> Rahelu/Nheras rivalry resolved
 </E> Rahelu/Lhorne romantic tension resolved
</E> Outcome of cultist ritual

Why did I write it this way? And why did I write a whole limbo chapter (this chapter) where we’re just hanging around with Rahelu as she tidies up loose ends like her Guild debt?

Well, there were several reasons.

#1: Climax and narrative outcome

Epic fantasy stories and tournament plot archetypes typically have a long build-up to a big action sequence that serves as the climax. That showdown/fight/battle/whatever typically is also the definitive turning point that determines the conclusion of the narrative.

It doesn’t work for Petition.

Though the fantasy job interviews, as I’ve conceived them, are essentially run as tournaments, there’s a gap between the result of the “final round” and the actual outcome. The Houses are the ultimate arbiters of Rahelu’s Petition, and that evaluation of her performance happens off-page.

At this point in the book, I don’t think there’s much doubt as to whether Rahelu is going to get an offer from the Houses, and whether she’ll accept it.

The only remaining real question is, which House will she choose?

#2: The stakes have changed

The opening chapters of Petition have narrative beats that are similar enough to what you see in “protagonist tries to get into prestigious institution” stories that a lot of readers get “magic school” vibes, even though I’m not writing magic school (because I have nothing to add to magic school).

But the moment you see Rahelu fail and witness her mother dying in Onneja’s Augury, those magic school vibes are gone. I tried to signal this narrative shift more explicitly back in Chapter 16, when Rahelu shoves Nheras into the background literally.

#3: Emotional journey

Petition is a story about debt, duty, and sacrifice.

Yes, there’s a big plot focus of the murder investigation on, “Can we stop the cultists?”, but the emotional core of book is about understanding the costs and still choosing to pay them.

The superficial question of “which House?” needs to be answered, but in my opinion, provides the least emotional resolution, because it has nothing to do with what the book is really about.

Cutting from the deaths of Hzin and the cultists straight to “here’s the verdict from the Houses” feels wrong. Petitioning was a more gruelling ordeal than Rahelu ever anticipated, and the personal cost she had to bear was much higher than she thought possible. Skipping over the time Rahelu needs to reflect and recover would lessen the narrative and emotional weight of her journey.

(Also, can you imagine the tonal whiplash if the book went from “we stopped the cultists but not before they killed a bunch more people, so actually this victory feels like a failure” to a plot beat about Rahelu and Lhorne’s relationship? Or Rahelu and Nheras’s rivalry?)

So Chapter 23 is a denouement, of sorts. It’s slow; it’s introspective; it has a “treading water” feel to it.

It’s also 100% true to life of the agonizing wait to hear back from an interview for a job you desperately need.

I know for some readers this chapter and the next will feel like they drag. I remember being frustrated myself during the drafting process, because despite wanting to just get on with hitting the next plot beat of “which Houses made an offer?”, I couldn’t move on until I had written through the emotional resolutions.

And because I was worried about the lack of forward plot momentum, I ended the chapter by introducing another open loop—which you’re really not supposed to do when you’re trying to wrap up a book.

Maybe if I were a more experienced writer, I would have been able to think of a different, less unconventional way to write it.

On the whole, though, I’m satisfied with how it works.

*Note 1: I say “romantic” rather than “romance” because one of the biggest lessons I learned about genre during my publishing journey is that readers like me, who predominantly read fantasy, will use the term “romance” to describe any relationship that is romantic in nature. However, capital-R romance as a genre requires a “happily ever after” or “happy for now” ending because romance stories are fundamentally about how the characters fall in love and get together. (Which, as I discussed in the annotations for Chapter 9 and Chapter 19, I have no interest in writing because I kind of detest the HEA/HFN concept in principle.)

To be clear, I’m not making a definitive statement about where the Rahelu/Lhorne relationship will go because I won’t know what will happen in the later books until I write them.

This is just more of a heads-up/warning that I do not and cannot promise you a capital-R romance because I don’t pull narrative punches and my characters don’t have plot armor.

(To wit: during the beta read of Supplicant, my beta readers were making bets in their in-line comments and feedback on who was going to die next.) [return]

Where Rahelu and Lhorne—or any of my characters, for that matter—will end up depends on where the story takes them, the kind of people they become, what they choose, and whether they survive the consequences of their actions.

**Note 2: one thing in the MICE quotient I struggled with was how to approach relationship arcs. Initially, I always thought of them as character arcs because intuitively you go, well, it’s about characters and how they relate to each other, so of course it’s a character arc, but whenever I tried writing relationships as character arcs, it just confused the hell out of me.

It wasn’t until I listened to this Writing Excuses podcast on character relationships that it clicked for me. In hindsight, I should have realized why writing these relationships as mini character arcs didn’t work from the start.

Fundamentally, character arcs are about a character being dissatisfied with an aspect of self, and to apply that to a relationship means the character must be dissatisfied with the relationship.

For Rahelu, in terms of her relationships with Lhorne and with Nheras, that’s simply not the case. She’s content being friends with Lhorne (though he isn’t) and hating Nheras (who likewise detests Rahelu).

Event arcs, however, are concerned with disruptions to the status quo. When Lhorne reveals he’s interested in Rahelu romantically, that’s an external disruption to their friendship. When Rahelu finds success beyond what’s expected of her, the elevation in her social status threatens Nheras’s position.

In both cases, the main question for Rahelu is whether she accepts the change in status quo. That’s a decision she has to make based on where she is her character arc.

(Interestingly, I think this means if I were to write Petition from Lhorne’s POV, I possibly would have to approach his relationship with Rahelu as a character arc rather than an event arc.)

Realizing that these relationships needed to be approached as event arcs rather than character arcs didn’t necessarily change how I wrote them, but it did help me understand what I was trying to do, and thus clarified what was/wasn’t working so I could tighten up the narrative during revisions. [return]

When it comes to the inclusion of explicit sex scenes in fantasy novels (particularly those not targeted towards romance readers), the decision tends to be divisive. Readers typically fall into two camps: those who find the sexual content gratuitous and/or unnecessary, and those who disagree.

I’ll admit that I used to be in the former camp. I didn’t hate or skim explicit sex scenes, but they often read awkwardly to me (sometimes to the point of being cringe-inducing). But even when they were well-written, I generally didn’t understand the author’s reasons for including them.

Case in point: the explicit sex scene early on in Fonda Lee’s Jade City, when Hilo visits Wen. We’re five chapters in (it’s titled “The Horn’s Kitten”) and this scene is our first introduction to Maik Wenruxian: she’s a stone-eye (someone without the ability to use jade magic) and the younger sister of Hilo’s two most trusted men.

When I first read this scene, I remember being extremely puzzled and put off. I couldn’t figure out why this interaction had to be shown on page—in that level of detail, with that kind of blunt, explicit language, and with that much of the word count devoted to it—instead of written as a fade-to-black or alluded to. There was nothing, I thought, that you couldn’t have gotten from a short sentence or two summarizing what happened. All of the important plot-relevant exposition you need takes places during the post-coital conversation the morning after.

Eventually, I got to the conclusion to the trilogy, Jade Legacy. It has another explicit sex scene that takes place between the same characters, many years later.

When I read that, I finally understood.

Hilo and Wen have a beautifully complex relationship that evolves and grows over the course of the trilogy which spans some thirty-plus years. Where they start (an up-and-coming gangster and his side piece, who has no place in gang business) and where they end up (as the mob boss and his most trusted advisor) is a study in contrasts. Who these characters believe themselves to be, who they are to each other, how they relate to each other and to the world—it’s a deep and nuanced exploration of all the ways in which love and duty complement and conflict with each other.

Looking back at the overall story, I don’t think those arcs and those later moments would have landed or been as emotionally powerful as they were without the explicit sex scenes. Those scenes ground the characters and their relationships in a raw and visceral way that other moments wouldn’t. When we see Hilo with Wen, whether it’s through his perspective or hers, we see him being vulnerable and open in a way that doesn’t come across in his other scenes. When we see Wen pursue the actions she does in secret, knowing why she makes those decisions, knowing how Hilo would feel about them, knowing how she feels about him, it adds stakes because we can guess at—and anticipate—the hurt and the fallout when he discovers it.

That was the moment when it clicked for me.

The sex scenes in The Green Bone Saga are not about the sex.

Which is a very long-winded way of getting to the point of this particular annotation: why did I write an explicit masturbation scene into Petition?

Because the scene is not about the sex.

But also because it’s the 2020s and hey, guess what? I’m sick of reading epic fantasy novels that feature subplots with female characters going on sexual/romantic awakening character arcs that culminate in her “becoming a woman” because some male character has “taught her” to do so and, somehow, no matter what her ambitions/wants are, she discovers that her life was “incomplete” prior to “falling in love” and suddenly finds ultimate meaning and purpose in life through being his sexual/romantic partner.

Just…no.

Girls and women do feel sexual desire and they don’t need a boy, or a man, or anyone for that matter, to satisfy that desire.

It is actually possible to feel sexual desire or have romantic inclinations towards someone and not want to take it any further because, you know, you’ve got priorities and being in a committed romantic relationship requires work and you don’t have the bandwidth for that.

And we don’t need to be ashamed of any of these things.

Of all the chapters in Petition, this is probably the one that I learned the most from even though it is one of the chapters that changed the least.

Because I write very similarly to how Naomi Novik writes—by starting with a character’s voice and inhabiting that character’s viewpoint—I generally have a very strong sense of whether a scene or sequence is or isn’t working. When I get the voice and the viewpoint right, the words just flow.

Such was the case with this chapter.

Chapter 21 concludes the mystery part of the cultist subplot and marks the turning point into the first climax of the book. (Petition is structurally weird because I consider there to be three climaxes altogether—but we’ll talk about that in later annotations.) There are five scenes in total:

1. Rahelu and her team in the alleyway
2. An Evocation of Xyuth and Dharyas’s last moments
3. The immediate aftermath of that discovery
4. An argument over dinner at the inn
5. Rahelu trying to sleep (added post beta read)

Aside from filling in 112 XXX placeholders and minor line edits (a net change of -266 words), what you read in the published version is basically the same as the original alpha draft. Scenes #1 through #4 were about as clean a draft as I typically write. The voice, the viewpoint, the character moments, the emotional beats, the overall arc—all of it was right. It worked.

Then the first piece of beta reader feedback came in.

I remember reading it and being absolutely devastated. For a few hours, I just sat there, thinking, “Oh god, they hate it,” over and over and over.

It didn’t work.

Why? Why didn’t it work?

I had no idea.

I kept looking at the feedback. While harsh, it had been honestly and thoughtfully written with a great deal of care behind it.

And yet.

When I had gone through every line of the text and considered every question they had raised, I couldn’t agree.

Fundamentally, I still felt like those scenes and that sequence were right. If they weren’t—well, I didn’t know how else to write them. But it took me three days of hard thinking to be able to articulate my reasons for writing these scenes and this sequence in this way.

Tragedy—and by extension, grief—is tricky to handle. Tragedy is an event but grief is a response; an individual one.

Considering the characters and their relationship to Dharyas:

• Ghardon and Elaram: Dharyas was House Isca and they’re House Issolm. They may have studied together; they may have even interacted at social events. Most likely, this would not have been a frequent occurrence, given how much Dharyas likes to duck out on social events. They’re not colleagues or friends; they’re casual acquaintances.
• Rahelu: She likes Dharyas. But, as Rahelu pointed out to Lhorne in Chapter 10, they’ve been friends for less than a day. After Petition Day, Rahelu never saw Dharyas again until she stumbled on her corpse in the Tattered Quill.
• Lhorne. Not only are House Ideth and House Isca allied, he and Dharyas were close friends from childhood. Of all the characters present in this chapter, he is the one whose life would be the most impacted by her death.

For all of these characters, Dharyas’s death is personal.

They are graduates of the Resonance Guild. They were the ones who discovered her body at the scene of her murder.

But for Ghardon, Elaram, and Rahelu, it is not a personal tragedy.

They knew her but she was not their friend, their protégé, their daughter. Her death does not leave a gaping hole in their lives. Their reactions should, therefore, be proportionate to reflect that the shock, horror, and distress they feel is not, cannot, and therefore should not be treated as comparable—or even approachable—to what Lhorne or Tsenjhe or House Isca feel.

Ghardon, Elaram, and Rahelu can’t grieve for Dharyas, in the same way that Lhorne does. Portraying what they feel as grief doesn’t portray what Lhorne feels with the gravity that his feelings deserve.

For most of the characters, Xyuth’s death is confronting, but not personal. They’ve never met nor heard of him, prior to this. For Rahelu, there’s personal guilt from the possibility that her actions might have directly led to Xyuth’s murder and, by extension, Dharyas’s murder.

Though this is never explicitly stated, Rahelu is affected by these two deaths.

There is a marked change in the prose style in the aftermath scene, with long, run-on sentences and extensive parentheticals. This is not the analytical, structured thought process typical of Rahelu’s POV, nor do the sentences and paragraphs have the same cadence of her usual narration.

You have to read between the lines in the prose—how she remembers Xyuth had a consort and a daughter, how she reacts to the workers discussing how to arrange Dharyas’s hair, how later, at the inn, she eats everything in sight other than the pheasant dish—and connect these details together to deduce how she feels.

I could make this more overt but I’m not a fan of spelling out things that can be inferred.* The heavy reliance on subtext does make the prose more cognitively demanding to read but it’s an authorial choice I stand by.

There’s also the matter of how people in a high performance culture handle and express strong emotions in a high pressure, high stakes situation.

From the outset, the assignment is established as a stretch challenge even in the best of circumstances. The consequences of failure are life-threatening. None of the Petitioners can afford to go to pieces, so none of them do.

They have evil cultists to stop. They can break down afterwards.

One thing I’ve learned to do is to not action every piece of feedback** immediately. Reading is an individual experience. As feedback came in from the rest of my beta readers, it became clear that, for the vast majority, the emotional moments and the overall arc in the chapter did land. Nevertheless, I didn’t dismiss that one outlier in the beta reader feedback.

Neil Gaiman has famously said that people are generally right about how they feel but wrong about what the problem is and how to fix it. In my experience, this is true.

Originally, the chapter ends on a character moment I like quite a lot: my little dig at the trope of two guys fighting for/over a girl and ‘winning’ her.

There’s no such gendered practices in my setting and Rahelu has nothing to do with the conflict between Lhorne and Ghardon but people are people. Lhorne is romantically attracted to Rahelu and she to him. Ghardon knows this and has been goading them both. When Ghardon makes a bid to exploit this attraction and Lhorne falls for it, the implied sleeping arrangements are clear. Except Rahelu stymies them both by rejecting the game.

As fun and satisfying as this subversion of expectations might be, what it doesn’t do is close the emotional loop opened when the characters discover the murders. Throughout the chapter, there’s simply been escalating tensions but no release. Even though the personal conflict between Ghardon and Lhorne comes to a head with the duel, the outcome doesn’t resolve the question of how they’re going to stop the cultists or provide any emotional catharsis.

That’s why there needed to be one more scene.

When each of the characters are somewhat alone, the illusion of privacy allows them to be more honest. That’s when the prose can be more overt without coming across as either on-the-nose, overdone, or patronizing. And that brief moment of vulnerability is what provides the emotional catharsis we need.

*One of my favorite books is The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, whom I think is one of the most thoughtful and brilliant SFF writers of our generation. Baru is the kind of glorious, tightly written masterwork that I don’t even aspire to write some day; I simply like to read it repeatedly, admiring the beauty of its elegant construction, the way Dickinson’s deft understated prose uses subtext to express more emotion through restraint than most people do with an entire dictionary, and sing its praises to everybody I know. (back to reading)

**These days, I try not to read beta reader feedback as it comes in, because it’s better to look at it all at once so you can a sense of how the story is working across the board for the majority of readers. Makes it a lot easier not to freak out too! (back to reading)

When I started out writing Petition, I chose to write it in third person limited perspective. There were many reasons for that decision:

• Most modern genre fiction is written in third person limited past tense. Especially epic fantasy, when there’s lots of POVs. That’s not to say you can’t have multi-first person POVs (Naomi Novik’s multi-first person POV in Spinning Silver worked incredibly well) or a blend of first and third POVs (J.T. Greathouse does this in Pact and Pattern where The Hand of the Sun King is all first person POV and then The Garden of Empire sticks with first person for Wen Alder’s chapters and uses third person for the other POVs). But third person limited for all POVs used tends to be the default; I suspect because it’s easier to write and easier to read. And while Petition only had two POVs, I wanted the option to have more POVs in later books in the series.
• First person is really, really hard to do well. When done well, it’s brilliant. (Examples that I’ve loved: Novik’s single POV first person in The Scholomance; K.J. Parker, however, might have written my favorite first person novel in Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City.) But when done poorly, it becomes really off-putting to read—I have DNF’d many a book for badly written first person POV.
• There is no need for the story to be told in first person. Usually first person lends itself well to framing narratives—another technique that is brilliant when done well and irritating when done poorly—and I didn’t see this story needing one.
• Second person is even more divisive. I’ve actually written a lot of second person prose (it’s the default when you’re writing case studies and immersive simulations) but it’s even harder to pull off in prose fiction than first person. Examples that I’ve loved: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower, and Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts Through Water. But all of those work because there are very specific plot and character reasons for choosing second person—and I didn’t have any of those reasons here.
• Third person omniscient could have been fun. A lot of my favorite series actually flow between third person limited (a.k.a. a ‘close’ third) and third person omniscient. It’s really interesting to read The Empire Trilogy and Green Bone Saga closely to see how Feist/Wurts and Lee negotiate these shifts! I also love it when the omniscient narrator has a distinct voice as well—all of the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis do this, and the omniscient narrator often adopts first person too. But again, that adds extra layers and extra layers mean additional complexity and I did not want to bite off more than I could handle.

After deciding to write in a close third, the next choice was tense: past or present?

In my experience, past tense is more common but present tense lends a feeling of immediacy to the reading experience you don’t quite get with past tense. That said, I do tend to find that when I’m reading in present tense, I have to go through a bit of an adjustment period for the first couple of pages but once I’m into the story, I hardly notice the tense.

In the end, I cheated and used both.

For the most part, Petition (and its sequels) are written in third person limited past tense, with one big exception: any time the POV character is using or witnessing one of the time-based resonance skills, the Evocation, Seeking, or Augury is written in present tense.

This was a deliberate choice because I was after a very specific effect.

The core premise behind the magic is that emotions have resonances that echo through time. When you’re reaching back in the past with Evocation, or trying to glimpse the future with Augury, or trying to get a sense of how someone else is feeling in the present with Seeking, you’re actively experiencing those emotions in the moment of the working, regardless of when those emotions originate in time. The abrupt switch to the immediacy of present tense from past tense is the most effective technique to convey how this feels.

The other benefit is that the tense switch, in combination with indented, italicized text, is a very clear indication to the reader that ~Something Magical~ is happening. This is pretty useful as well because I often have POV shifts in Evocations, Seekings, and Auguries too!

…at least, that was my intent. So far, readers seem to be able to follow along without a problem, though it’ll be interesting to see what happens when they get to Supplicant, the sequel!

Many things have caught me unaware during the process of writing Petition but one wins the prize for the biggest surprise by a very large margin: the romantic subplot. That’s because I absolutely detest romance as a genre. (Sorry romance fans; it’s just not for me.)

I could—and have—gone on long rants about why: I hate the elevation of attaining a “happily-ever-after”/“happy-for-now” above all other ambitions, no matter how worthy; I hate how it insinuates that no one can be complete and fulfilled without a romantic partner and romantic love; I hate the myths it perpetuates about the nature of love, that love makes everything easy and effortless, that love conquers all; I hate how convoluted and artificial and contrived the majority of the conflicts to the romance are; I hate the angst (dear heaven, save me from the pages and pages and pages of angsting), the melodrama, the tropes, the eyerolling formulaic predictability of the plot, the—

You get my drift.

So why is there a romantic subplot in Petition, one that isn’t advertised in the blurb or cover?

I’ll tackle the easy one first: I don’t advertise or market the romantic subplot as a romance because it isn’t a romance.

Now the harder question: why put in a romantic subplot at all?

I didn’t intend to. Rahelu has no time for romantic inclinations, let alone dalliances. But while I didn’t want to write a romance, I didn’t want to go to the other extreme of pretending that romance doesn’t exist.

People do fall in love. People do yearn for love. People go to all sorts of extremes in the name of love. It is a human thing. And it turns out that when you put Rahelu and Lhorne in a situation where they get to spend time with each other, feelings develop.

Similar to the previous chapter, this chapter is full of dead ends for the main plot. Logic for tight plotting dictates that if nothing of interest has happened, I should summarize and skip over to the next plot beat that advances the main plot. In a shorter work, like a novella or a short story, I would’ve cut straight to the events of Chapter 20, but that felt like the wrong choice for a novel.

Why? Well, I think it’s because it risks turning the characters into plot delivery mechanisms. (Not that that was something I could articulate at the time.)

I’ve done some impossible jobs. Jobs that involve chaining myself to a desk in a windowless room crammed so full of people and documents that you can’t move without knocking over a stack of files or bumping someone else for 10, 12, 14 hours every single day because if you don’t, you won’t make deadline and heaven help you if you miss deadline because entire fortunes are waiting on you to meet deadline to decide whether they’ll rise or fall so you cannot, cannot miss deadline. Ever.

You would think that kind of job would make for a grim, stressful experience, full of hyper-focused Type-As too obsessed with climbing the corporate ladder to socialize—and there were huge stretches of time that fit that description to a tee. But I know, from personal experience, even when you are working on deadline in high pressure environments slogging through monotonous task after monotonous task in a pile that seems to replenish itself with more every time you look, people are still people. The work itself, when there are no exceptions to be found, recedes into the background and interpersonal dramas become the thing that passes the time.

You start noticing little quirks.

Idle curiosity provides a jumping off point for conversations which bloom into rapport (or disdain) and inside jokes and running gags that give rise to: hook-ups that turn into flings or serious romances; joy; camaraderie; silly pranks; absurdity that, if I told you exactly how it happened, you would tell me it sounds boring, unfunny, or ridiculous. (Which, robbed of context, would be true.)

It’s in these smaller moments that characters get to be more than what their role in the larger plot or their archetype suggests.

Sometimes, it really is just about the fish. There is no deeper purpose.

Other times, it’s not about the fish. There is a deeper subtext.

As they say: you had to be there.

Hence, the date.

Yes, they’re in the middle of investigating a series of gruesome murders.

Yes, they’re no closer to figuring out who the killer might be.

Yes, they’re running out of time.

They’ve also done everything that they possibly can for the moment; they need a break.

This date is the equivalent of hitting the bar for some after work drinks at 9 PM on a Friday night when you’ve spent all week fighting fires and you know you’re going to be back in the office again all day on Saturday from 7:30 AM because there’s no other way of keeping up with your workload and if you fall behind, your ass will get fired.

So: drinks.

Maybe something happens. Maybe nothing happens. Either way, you’re going so you can take your mind off all the things you’ve been worrying about for a few hours. You want that temporary distraction; you NEED it to stay sane.

But why then skip to the end of the date only to write the whole thing in flashback and mostly in Rahelu’s head?

If I were writing a romance according to proper romance beats, writing the event in chronological order, as Rahelu experienced it, would have been the conventional choice to make. But Petition is not a romance, nor is this a romance subplot. (It’s a romantic subplot, distinction being that while there is a romantic relationship, the focus is not on how they get together because that ‘how’ is not a given.) Petition is the story of the immigrant experience in a fantasy setting—and in that story, romance and romantic feelings and relationships are distractions; setbacks even.

Also, I’m really not a fan of how so often in fantasy and literature that’s not explicitly written to be romances that we still end up with so many story lines that conform to the conventional romance genre narrative template of: person meets potential love interest, person develops romantic feelings for potential love interest, insert some progression here, then BAM! They’re Together and now A Couple and That’s It.

No. Just no.

That’s such a narrow, idealized representation of relationships and romance and love and I find it incredible that it’s pervasive to the point of being the default in stories that aren’t marketed as romances.

Give me stories where relationships aren’t so neatly defined and simple. Give me “it’s complicated” dynamics like Gideon/Harrow and Harrow/Ianthe (and pretty much every pairing you can name) from The Locked Tomb. Give me characters who find romantic love and love deeply but do not allow that romantic love to subsume their entire identity and divert them from their purpose, like Lady Mara of the Acoma from The Empire Trilogy and Baru Cormorant/Tain Hu from The Masquerade.

We need more of them.

Chapter 18 is the kick-off for the murder investigations which make up the second half of Petition. Whenever I look back at this chapter and the outline I had for it now, it’s always very funny to me.

Not only am I someone who isn’t very into crime fiction, I’m also terrible with outlines.

But I knew when I decided to add in this murder mystery that I would have to have some semblance of an outline because I had to know, in advance, who the killer was, what their motive/s were, how the victims died, and what kind of clues Rahelu and her team of Petitioners would be able to find.

So I wrote down some basic questions like:

• Who’s been killed so far?
• Who is the killer targeting?
• What is the murder weapon?
• What is the killer’s motive?
• Is the killer working alone?
• How did they kill [extremely spoiler-rific character name]?
• Who are they going to kill next?

I came up with 1-sentence answers to each of those questions and then I used Brandon Sanderson’s promise/progress/pay-off framework to plot the rest of the murder mystery.

• Promise: there’s a killer going around the city knifing people with an odd weapon. If Rahelu and team can catch the killer, then they can stop the murders and also she can pay off her family’s debts.
• Progress: ~921 words across 17 sub-bullet points that outline, in 1-2 sentences, what happens sequentially to solve the murders and confront the killer.
• Pay-off: this one is obvious 😉

It ended up being more fun and easier than I expected mainly because:

1. Murder mysteries come with a built-in plot structure. Step 1: investigate the crime scene. Step 2: interview witnesses. From there, it becomes a series of pursuing clues and running into dead ends which dovetails very nicely with the “Yes, but…”/“No, and…” technique for building out the story.
2. I have the benefit of being in a writing group with Caitlin L. Strauss (author of the sci/urban fantasy detective procedural series, The Nocturnum Files) and Dan Harris (author of the humorous urban fantasy series, Unit 13, and some soon-to-be-published cozies). Seeing how they work behind-the-scenes to construct their stories has been a great help.
3. I also cheated by not writing a whodunit where the tension revolves around identifying and then figuring out which of the many possible suspects is the real killer. Instead, the plot revolves around tracking down the killer before someone else dies which, to me, is simpler.

One thing I did worry about—and that did come up in alpha reader and early beta reader feedback—was the sudden tone and plot switch from tournament to murder mystery. My solution for the tone issue was to add in the prologue and herald the plot switch with both Onneja’s Augury and repeated signals from Maketh that the stakes have changed. Late beta reader feedback indicated this worked for the most part though people were still confused as to how Rahelu suddenly had such excellent investigative skills so I added in a few lines of narration to clarify this.

Looking back at the various drafts, I think this was one of the most fun chapters to write.

While it’s not the first time we’ve got Rahelu interacting with her peers, it is the first time she’s doing so in relatively relaxed fashion. Strictly speaking, the first half of the chapter is full of dead ends and the latter half of the chapter—once we devolve from a debrief of their investigations to ribbing at Ghardon’s expense and a follow-up on the subject of Rahelu’s dinner plans—has no relation to the main plot at all.

The only thing maintaining a very light level of tension is the question of “who won the bet?” set up at the end of the first scene. I could have cut straight from the debrief to the next chapter but I think the story would have been poorer for it. Letting the serious conversation over lunch devolve into more lighthearted moments gives us emotional variety and the characters more dimensionality.

That, to me, is what makes a story both more fun to write and to read.

Chapter 17 is the shortest chapter in Petition. (Technically, the prologue, interlude, and epilogue are significantly shorter but they don’t really count.) The basic plot trope/beat—a makeover sequence—is pretty straightforward. And, as with most things that ended up in Petition, I didn’t set out to write it consciously.

I kind of hate the makeover trope on principle for many reasons:

• It (often) places outsized emphasis on physical appearance and superficial trappings (like clothing, etc) over other attributes that I think are more important (like beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, etc). Like I genuinely haaaaaaaaate Sandy’s entire character arc in Grease because it can be summed up as: “girl meets boy; girl is compelled by boy’s entire social network to change everything about herself so she can be his Ideal Sex Object” which is just gross.
• It feels lazy. (How to show a character changing? Let’s just literally alter their outward appearance and call it done!)
• It’s been done to death. (Bet you can’t name a single fish-out-of-water story that doesn’t involve a makeover.)

So why did I put in a makeover scene if I can’t stand the trope?

At time, I couldn’t tell you why, other than “it feels right”. I felt that the story needed a change in tone, a change in pace, and also some more time developing the character relationships before we got back into the action. The House-born Petitioners dragging Rahelu off for clothes and resonance crystal shopping was just the most obvious idea that sprang to mind. But, in hindsight, I think there’s a few deeper reasons for including a makeover scene.

Makeovers are a staple in many stories

Perhaps it’s because we find them intrinsically fascinating because of the way they dramatize and juxtapose the before and after. Or perhaps it’s because all stories, arguably, can be boiled down to makeovers since—in the words of the great Ursula Le Guin—stories are about change. After all, if you go by the Save the Cat structure, you’re obligated to literally bookend your story with the before/after in your Opening Image and your Final Image beats.

What’s interesting to me is that most of the time when we hear “makeover”, we generally think “character makeover”—i.e. stories where the character needs to grow and transform to survive in the new environment. But there are other kinds of makeovers too—environmental makeovers—where the character stays the same but transforms their new environment. And sometimes, the transformation goes both ways with the character and the environment transforming each other.

It’s also interesting to consider where those scenes are placed in the narrative relative to the character’s arc and how they result in a different narrative effect.

• Early in the narrative: the outward change is a physical manifestation of the new environment being thrust upon the character. The character’s arc is then about growing into that outward transformation.
• Middle of the narrative: the outward change marks a turning point in the character’s arc where they stop actively resisting and start to pursue growth.
• Late in the narrative: the outward change is an acknowledgement of the transformation that has already occurred. It’s the celebration, the victory lap, of a battle already won.

Chapter 17 happens shortly after the midpoint of Petition. It’s the first time Rahelu sets foot—literally—in a part of the House-born world she’s aspiring to join and she’s forced to make some compromises. At the end of the scene, she also, for the first time, decides to pursue something that’s purely for herself.

On top of that, we get to tie together several details (her family’s debts, their livelihood as fisherfolk, the loss of her Guild ring and tunic, Lhorne’s previous attempt to buy her lunch) into a character moment that develops the Rahelu/Lhorne relationship further while giving us a much needed change in tone and a breather from fast paced main plot.

Gender roles and clothing

A pet peeve of mine is gendered clothing. To me, clothing is both a physical manifestation of gender roles in society and an insidious method of imposing them. “Girls wear this; boys wear that. Good girls dress like this; bad girls dress like that.”

These days, I find it really difficult to pick up any fiction where the main conflict revolves around a woman or girl rebelling against traditional gender roles. These stories are important because that fight is still ongoing today…but I don’t want to read them anymore, especially not in my fantasy novels.

The power of fiction—all fiction, but speculative fiction in particular—is to pose the question, “what if?” and see where that leads. What would the world be like if this wasn’t true? How would our lives be different if that wasn’t a fundamental law of reality?

So why do so many fantastical settings carry over gendered clothing from our society as an unconscious default?

It’s not just that the gendered clothing is part of the default of “generic vaguely European medieval setting” that a Western audience automatically associates with “fantasy setting”.

It’s not just that so many fantastical settings incorporate real world gender roles and expectations as part of their default.

Why don’t these settings ever stop to consider the reason for gendered differences in real world clothing in the first place—and then consider whether those reasons even exist in that fantasy setting before importing real world fashions?

In writing Petition, I didn’t want to perpetuate any of these things. The reason Rahelu doesn’t wear skirts or dresses or gowns isn’t just because she comes from an impoverished family or because she’s attired for combat; Rahelu doesn’t wear them for the same reason that Nheras doesn’t wear them.

They don’t exist.

They don’t exist because I decided that in this world, gender equality is the default. Gender does not enter into the conversation of whether someone can do something; it’s simply not relevant to the decision. And if that’s the case, why would clothing differentiate between the genders?

The answer is, it wouldn’t.

So:

In Rahelu’s world, there’s everyday wear (tunic or shirt over trousers) and there’s formal wear (robes).

Clothing differs based on culture, wealth, societal position, and individual preference. It does not differ depending on gender or biological characteristics, other than for the obvious requirement of sizing. Hnuare’s shop, the Impeccable Mage, does not have a “men’s section” and a “women’s section”.

Ergo, if Elaram had been shopping for Ghardon instead of Rahelu, she would still be pulling out the same kind of clothes.

Epic fantasy has been my genre of choice ever since I stumbled across it at my local library. I can’t even remember which book or series it was exactly—perhaps The Belgariad by Eddings or Magician by Raymond E. Feist or it could’ve been Dragonlance by Weis and Hickman or maybe Pern by Anne McCaffrey. (Really, it could have been anything from the ‘80s and ‘90s.)

My parents could only take me to the library once a week and we could only borrow a maximum of ten books on one library card; that meant I had to pick books long enough to last me until the next library trip. That boiled down to “is this book thick enough that I need two hands to hold it comfortably?”

But since I devoured all the books so quickly, regardless of their size, I ended up with a very distorted sense of length as a reader.

That is how I ended up with an original outline that had called for ~25,000 words to cover the events of Petition to reach the end of Act I of the overall narrative. So in the very first attempt at writing Petition, I originally skipped straight from the events in Chapter 12 to Chapter 26.

(Yep. That’s a huge jump of some ~57,000 words or so. That version of the story is about ~38,600 words long.)

…Yeah. That didn’t work out. Clearly, I am incapable of writing an epic fantasy book that is only 75,000 words long. I was stuck; at the rate I’d been going, it would take me another ~80,000 words to write the next two acts I’d planned and I wasn’t confident I could pull off writing a book that long.

But ~38,600 words is waaaaaaaay too short to be a novel. (It’s a novelette? Novella? I never know where the line is drawn for those.)

That said, I was confident that the end of what would become Chapter 27 was the most emotionally powerful moment in the story yet. So I decided to cheat: I would add a subplot to the job hunt tournament to (hopefully) bulk up the word count by another ~33,000 words to end back up at my target of ~75,000 words.

I don’t exactly recall how I decided the subplot would be a murder mystery or that the murderers would be a bunch of cultists running around conducting ritual sacrifices. (It was probably because I was following Brandon Sanderson’s advice to build what you have before inventing new things; at that point, I had vaguely outlined what was involved in Act II of the overall narrative so the world building for the cult and the Endless Gate already existed.) Murder mysteries, though, require a lot more planning than tournaments so I took a week off writing new words to plot one in detail first.

Strictly speaking from a plot perspective, Chapter 16 marks a transition point to the second half of the book: the introduction of the murder mystery subplot signals a convergence between the main plot and the events foreshadowed in the Prologue and Interlude. Arguably I could have put the Interlude between Chapters 15 and 16 instead of having it before Chapter 15. However, since I was sticking to a linear timeline, the interlude chronologically happens before Chapter 15. I also like the switch up in tone where Chapter 15 sets up Rahelu’s expectation of the new status quo which is immediately upset by her seeing the assignment.

While my natural tendency is to write long scenes, it made sense to have a series of short arcs here, to tie up loose ends from the first half of the book and set the stage for the remainder of the novel with some “assemble the team!” scenes to introduce the main cast for this part of the story. Following the reality TV/tournament format, we’ve got the first elimination and a reset of the Petitioners’ board. Maketh’s speech serves two purposes: escalates the stakes of Petitioning again, and advance the House intrigue plot in the background.

Other noteworthy things:

• Nheras Ilyn: the opening chapters of Petition set up the expectation that Nheras is going to be the primary antagonist for the book and we get plenty of that in the early tournament rounds. But with the way I set up the final round of Petitioning, that doesn’t really work unless I put Rahelu and Nheras in the same team and since the Petitioners are allowed to choose their own teams, that was never going to happen. I tried to mitigate that with a brief exchange as a reminder that the rivalry is still there but has faded into the background given the raised stakes.
• The assignment board: Is this a deliberate nod to the adventurers’ quest board in ye olde standard sword & sorcery fantasy stories? Yes, yes it is. Did I intend to put that in from the very beginning? No, no I did not. How, then, did it end up in the book? I realized that fantasy iPads and computer screens would…actually work in my magic system and it would make sense for the society I’d created to use it. Also I’m a huge geek. And it was the easiest way of getting Rahelu’s arc to intersect with Azosh-ek’s while paying off on the promise of Onneja’s Augury in Chapter 13.
• Elaram’s legal disclaimer: Probably my favorite character moment in this chapter though Elaram facing off against Cseryl and justifying giving Lhorne a mild concussion comes a close second. This chapter actually had the very first Elaram scenes I wrote since her introduction in Chapter 8 was something I added later (as part of beta read revisions) and her entire character grew out of that one line in Chapter 9. (“Don’t take it so personally! We’re just following the rules!”)
• The trainee: we’ve seen Rahelu come pretty far in the book but I was conscious that because I was writing such a fast-paced book, I wanted another moment of character contrast. But I didn’t want to slow down the action just when we needed to be gearing up for more so I couldn’t put in another long reflective passage. (Not that Rahelu normally stops to do a whole lot of reflection anyway, because who’s got the time for that?) Hopefully having her notice just how different things were did the trick.
• The shopping trip: Another thing that I didn’t deliberately set out to include, though once the thought occurred, it seemed like a good idea. I should note here that I originally thought Elaram would be the instigator but when it came down to the writing, it felt more natural coming from Ghardon.

Finally, one of my biggest worries about this book (other than, “is anyone actually going to read this and think it’s not terrible?”) was that readers might be put off by the rotating cast of characters. Even though Petition is basically a single POV book since Azosh-ek’s POVs are so few and far between Rahelu chapters, there’s no consistent cast of side characters. Every chapter or two introduces one or two new characters:

• Chapter 1 introduces Rahelu’s family; and
• Chapter 2 introduces some potential antagonists: Hzin and Bzel, Nheras and her cousins.
• Then we’ve got Xyuth in Chapter 3;
• Tsenjhe and Keshwar in Chapter 4;
• Lhorne in Chapter 6;
• Dharyas in Chapter 7;
• Elaram in Chapter 8;
• Cseryl in Chapter 10;
• Nhirom, Anathwan and Mere in Chapter 12;
• Onneja in Chapter 13;
• Maketh in Chapter 14; and
• Ghardon in Chapter 16. (Ghardon, by the way, is the last of the notable characters to be introduced out of 27 total chapters, not counting the prologue/interlude/epilogue).

This is really an artifact of discovery writing. None of these characters—other than Rahelu, Onneja, and possibly Nheras—existed in my outline. They came into existence whenever I got to writing the end of one scene and started thinking about the kinds of conflict and who Rahelu might encounter next. Inevitably, it means having to go back through and scatter mentions of these characters in previous chapters during revisions, otherwise we end up with “pop-up” characters—characters who don’t feel like fully fleshed out individuals who exist in the world separate to the demands of the protagonist and the plot that pop up to fulfil a plot or character development in one chapter and then disappear, never to be seen of or hear from ever again.

Some days, when I look back over what I’ve written, I’m still not entirely convinced. Right now, I’m deep in the middle of doing alpha revisions on the third act of Supplicant, the sequel to Petition, and still grasping at understanding the motives of some of these characters. And there are certain ones whose motives still elude me entirely, even after trying to write scene after scene and chapter after chapter from their POV. But I hope that with more time and more words written, I’ll get better at creating characters who come across as real people.

I ought to have said back in the annotations for Chapter 13 that everything from Chapters 14 through to the end of Chapter 25 did not exist in the original outline, which called for the following:

Act I: Rahelu Petitions the Houses; becomes a Supplicant; is sent on assignment.

Act II: Rahelu completes the assignment. The assignment has huge consequences for the balance of power between the Houses.

Act III: House war.

Somehow I thought I was going to be able to do all that justice in…75,000 words.

…Yeah.

In that original version, the story skipped straight from the end of Rahelu’s audiences in Chapter 12 to the beginning of Chapter 26 and Act I ended with the end of Chapter 27. I got four (terrible) chapters into writing what was supposed to be Act II (and is now Book 2) before I became horribly stuck.

So I decided to cheat a little. I knew that final scene (what is now Chapter 27) was the best emotional scene I’d written and would make a strong ending. The logical thing to do here was to turn the book outline into a series outline and expand the ~38,000 words I had for what was supposed to be Act I into a full, 75,000-word novel. (Yeah, I still had delusions about being able to write a short novel.)

In my opinion, there’s only one good way to add length: add story. Again, I wanted something very tightly structured because I didn’t want to get too carried away and end up with something bloated.

Hence: the murder mystery that forms the second half of this book.

But I needed something to transition between the tournament arc—which is still ongoing since the Petitioners are competing with each other, though they’re doing so by completing assignments (quests) for the Houses—and the murder mystery subplot.

I also have a pet peeve about jobs and the recruitment process in general. I kind of hate it because the entire thing (as it exists in professional services) is a bait-and-switch for most.

The firms sell quite the dream to the bright-eyed grads fighting tooth and nail for a coveted position with them: a glamorous career where you’re using your hard-won skills and knowledge to present flashy, brilliant insights in pretty dataviz slide decks to the admiring applause of C-suite executives in the boardrooms where it happens.

The reality for most: 60+ hour work weeks wrangling data and documents that you don’t understand, triple checking figures and formulas with a calculator until your fingers and eyes bleed, going for coffee runs and other mundane tasks that make you wonder why you spent so long obtaining a very expensive university education to do things that don’t require you to use any of the knowledge and skills you’ve got.

Hence: the boring resonance crystal recharging assignment. Sorry, Rahelu. (Not sorry.) And sorry if you hated reading paragraphs upon paragraphs about it. (Sorriest to my beta readers, most of all, who had to read a very verbose version of it.)

Fortunately, this is fiction, not real life so things do happen.

Rahelu’s one-on-one time with Tsenjhe is one of my favorite character moments in the book. Too often in fantasy, women are set against each other. We expect the Nheras/Rahelu dynamic as a matter of default, where women are set up as rivals, often in the context of a man’s affections or approval or their suitability for these things and how well they embody femininity.

We rarely see all of the rich diversity of strong female relationships that exist in real life where women hold each other up. Even when we get female mentor/mentee relationships, it’s so often done in the context of “learning how to be a woman” or “learning how to deal with men” and I’m kind of sick of it.

Because just as men and boys can exist as self-actualized individuals and have relationships that do not revolve around the existence of women, women and girls do not need men to “complete” them as a person (please, let that Biblical notion die right there) and they can have fulfilling relationships that are not founded on any male-centric bases.

At the same time, romantic love and relationships is a pretty big part of life for most people. I don’t like the approach of just pretending it doesn’t exist either.

So it was important to me to show that Tsenjhe and Rahelu’s relationship is a strong one that is not centered around and would exist without Keshwar, even though he’s important to both of them. His name does come up twice in their conversations; both times, he is incidental to (and not the focus of) what they are discussing.

Because Tsenjhe and Rahelu’s identities do not revolve around how they fit into Keshwar’s life; they were fully realized people before Keshwar became part of their lives, will continue to be so long after he’s gone, and would have been so even if he never entered their lives.

When I wrote the published prologue, I did so very intentionally, knowing that I wanted it to form a little independent arc with the interlude and the epilogue. Yet I wanted to keep them as short as possible, so they wouldn’t “overstay their welcome” (as one of my beta readers put it) or steal focus from the main storyline of Rahelu joining the Houses.

But writing short things has always been a struggle for me. The initial draft of Azosh-ek’s prologue was 1,429 words long—and my alpha readers and I were agreed: it was far, far too long for a prologue.

Luckily one of them had an easy solution: end the prologue at “Time to be gone.”

That left me with a short fight scene about 1,057 words long. It was a scene that I liked quite a lot and had the right vibes. I added another 195 words to the beginning and hey, presto, I had an interlude!

If you’re reading along and you feel like you have no idea what’s going on in the prologue or the interlude, it’s totally okay. It’s meant to be “just vibes” at this point—hopefully intriguing ones!—that will be made clear later.

The storylines will eventually converge.

While I don’t have an exact outline of how everything will turn out, I know the general shape of it and, more importantly, the motivations of the characters and factions involved.

I do worry that by the time I get around to the writing, things will have shifted in my mind. (This happens a lot whenever I try to outline something in a reasonable level of detail; what’s actually written doesn’t really resemble much of what is outlined, but the overall concept doesn’t change.) Either way, I will do my very best to give you the most satisfactory ending I can.

I feel like a broken record saying this, over and over again, but in writing these annotations, it becomes really apparent just how mysterious my writing process is to myself: when I got to this point in the story, I had no idea how I was going to get Rahelu back into Petitioning after I’d decided that she had been eliminated.

But even though I detest repetitiousness in books, I feel like it’s important to be utterly clear that when I am writing and constructing a story, I never have a clue what I am doing.

Never.

I am, literally, just making it all up as I go.

I feel like this is important to reiterate because when I first began thinking “hey, I’d really like to write a novel someday” the biggest misconception I had was believing I had to know what I was doing in order to start writing.

No, no, and no!

Human beings are inherently wired to understand story. We literally can’t stop ourselves from seeing story in everything—attributing correlation and causation to random events and complex motivations to the acts of strangers, acquaintances, and close ones—because story is sense-making.

I didn’t need to memorize half a dozen story frameworks and watch fifty YouTube videos on “how to write a novel” or “how to plot” or “how to create characters”.

I just needed to sit down and start writing.

So that’s what I did.

I’m not trying to do anything fancy or groundbreaking with Petition—it’s written in third person limited perspective in accordance with current genre fiction conventions—which helps a lot.

To get writing, I just had to put myself in Rahelu’s shoes and work through a bunch of questions. Here’s an example of what I mean for the beginning of this chapter:

The starting point: Rahelu has failed in Petitioning and knows her mother is in danger of being murdered. Onneja has told her the only way to save her mother is to go back to the Guild and get into a House.

What must have gone wrong for her to fail in Petitioning? She mustn’t have convinced enough Houses to pass her to the next round.

How can she fix that? Find out how the Houses voted and convince the naysayers to change their minds.

Who would have those answers? The two Elders and the Atriarch who she had audiences with. But she can’t approach them so the next best person is Maketh Imos.

Where might Maketh Imos be? Most likely at the Guild.

The Guild is a big place. Where, exactly? She last saw him in the grand hall but he’s not there. He could be teaching, so the training yards or the classrooms are logical places to check—but he’s not. Maybe the admin staff at the Guild would know…

And that’s it.

That is literally my thought process when I’m writing in a character’s POV.

That’s how I write.

Which is why I have to write sequentially and why I struggle with outlining. It’s not so much the stereotypical “discovery writers can’t outline because once they’ve outlined, they’ve lost the thrill of discovering the story”, it’s because anything can look good to me in outline (bullet point) form but I can’t connect one bullet point to the next—can’t know if it makes sense to do so—until I start writing prose.

In a work of prose fiction, there is no story without the prose, because the prose is the story. Everything about the story—character, setting, tone, plot—is conveyed through the prose. One sentence has to flow to the next; each sentence has to build on those that came before. And when you do this over and over again, you get story.

Let me show you what I mean.

I began this chapter with this sentence:

Rahelu burst through the Guild gates.

Six words to establish POV (Rahelu), setting (the Guild gates, which we’re familiar with from earlier chapters), and tone (the desperate urgency of “burst” as opposed to the neutral “entered” or the lackadaisical “dawdled”; “through” implying overcoming a resistance as opposed to “in”).

This sentence leads to the next, and the next, and so on for the rest of the scene. Rahelu has arrived back at the Guild, she’s fired up because she’s moving at speed with forceful purpose (the implications of “burst” as a word choice again) and you know what her purpose is thanks to the close of the previous chapter and the current chapter title: she’s going to find some answers.

That leads seamlessly into the next set of lines—her introspection as she searches for those answers which shows us more of the Guild and the sociocultural norms of the setting—and the conclusion of that beat: Rahelu has gone full circle back to the grand hall and hasn’t been able to find anyone who can or is willing to help her.

What if I had started with this sentence?

Rahelu barged past the Guild gates.

Six words again. Same POV, same setting. But “barged past” implies unmerited self-assurance or a sense of entitlement or a blatant disregard for her surroundings. It signals some sort of direct confrontation ahead; perhaps with a comeuppance attached.

It could work, but I don’t think it would work as well. At least not from Rahelu’s POV, because in her mind, she’s motivated by desperation, not entitlement.

What if we changed the action and/or the setting?

Rahelu stole inside the Guild’s grand hall.

Seven words this time. We’ve cut straight to the Guild’s grand hall—with “stole” implying that she knows she shouldn’t be there—and skipped past all of Rahelu’s introspection and searching for answers.

Whether or not that beat is necessary is a different question. I could see people making an argument that it isn’t, considering her search is ultimately unsuccessful. But I think it is important to show that failure, otherwise we don’t feel just how lost and desperate she is. That way, when she’s sitting in the dark running her fingers over the resonance board—the tangible representation of what she’s failed to achieve—we understand what she’s thinking and feeling and why she decides fantasy hacking the matrix might be the thing to do.

After her previous failure, we get the thrill of watching her succeed—and then the terror of seeing her get caught immediately. And I don’t think Maketh hauling her off would hit quite the same if we hadn’t seen Rahelu spend all that time looking for him at the beginning.

Anyway. I hope that makes it clearer on what I mean when I say that prose is story, why I write the way I do, and why I recommend that if you want to write a story but you don’t know how to, you should just sit down with a blank page and start asking questions. Treat writing your story—whatever it may be—like it’s all just one, giant improvisatory exercise.

Ultimately, what you want to publish is a collection of written sentences that describe the situation, the emotional reaction to the stimuli, the physical action taken in response, and the consequence from the action, resulting in a new situation and new stimuli—over and over and over and over until you get to the end.

Because prose is story.

No prose? No story.

End of.

Addendum:

The very last scene in this chapter was added during my beta read revisions. Mostly because my beta readers got to the end of the interrogation chamber scene, went on to the next chapter, and were aghast they didn’t get a moment of Rahelu celebrating the win.

That feedback confused the hell out of me. Why would Rahelu celebrate? She failed…and was let back in based on some technicality she doesn’t even understand. She’s still got a long way to go before she’ll achieve her goal—and there’s no guarantee of that either.

Eventually, I realized that while the whole Petitioning process was clear in my mind, it wasn’t necessarily super clear in the text. That exposition also wasn’t something I felt like writing because every time I tried, my brain screamed “BORING BORING THIS IS SO BORING” at me.

I know this because I tried writing this last scene with Maketh as one where he lays out all of those rules to set up the next stage of Petitioning. And I just…couldn’t.

What I mean by that is “I couldn’t write a sentence that felt like it was authentic and consistent with how Maketh would act based on his characterization as already established in earlier chapters and in the context of the sociocultural norms of the Houses”.

It is the perfect example of how my outlining intent (“Maketh explains how the next part of Petitioning works”) falls apart the moment I have to write prose.

Maketh is pissed. He thinks Rahelu is a spy. He’s just been overruled by his superiors. He’s not going to explain anything nicely.

Nor do readers actually need Maketh to exposit any of the rules and regulations behind how Petitioning works at all; what they need is to have their expectations reset.

The solution that was staring me in the face: just have Rahelu be as ecstatic as readers expect she ought to be and then let Maketh bring her crashing back down to reality.

It’s one of the easiest revisions I had to do for this book…and one that took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out.

This chapter opens on a scene you probably expected: an announcement covering how everybody is doing in the tournament plotline; the fantasy novel version of the elimination episode on a reality TV show.

The main question we need to answer: does Rahelu get in and become a Petitioner or does she fail?

In the previous chapter, I tried hard to make both options plausible.

(Originally, this scene was placed at the end of Rahelu’s audiences so the second round of the tournament began and concluded within the same chapter. More on why I split the chapter later.)

But I’d realized early on, instinctively, that the right answer here is: Rahelu fails.

How did I know?

Because I didn’t want to write the scene where she succeeds.

Why not?

Because it involved me writing lots of words to describe Rahelu showing up to the grand hall to be told “congratulations, you’re a Petitioner now, here’s how the next stage of Petitioning works”.

And that is not a scene. That is an exposition dump. It is boring. Nobody wants to read that, including me. That means I don’t want to write it.

So how do you turn exposition into a scene? You find the source of tension.

I really like the try/fail cycle framework because it forces me to pin down conflict in a very concrete way that makes it easier to translate the conceptual idea of what the conflict is into prose. If I’m clear on what the conflict is, it’s easy for me to slip into my characters and figure out what they’re perceiving, how they react, and therefore how they respond. And then it’s just a matter of going from perception to reaction to response over and over again until the conflict is resolved.

The try/fail cycle also allows for wins along the way, even in the first half of the narrative. Characters can succeed at what they’re doing as long as there is some “Yes, but…” consequence to keep the tension going. The obvious way to do this would be to summarize “Rahelu, you’re in!” as quickly as possible so we can raise the stakes by cutting to the next stage of Petitioning and introducing the next conflict.

So why didn’t I do that?

Because I still didn’t want to write the scene where she succeeds. It didn’t feel like the right direction. It’s a tournament plot, but the archetype modern readers expect is “reality TV show elimination episode” which means they expect some sort of drawn out production about who gets in and who doesn’t. Which works when you’ve spent six one- or two-hour episodes a week getting to know all of the contestants on the TV show but doesn’t work in novel form when we’ve mostly been inside Rahelu’s head and we’ve only really met a handful of other applicants.

The narrative has spent so much time establishing Rahelu as an underdog; by this point, she’s beaten the odds twice already—both times by unconventional means. Once is a datapoint; twice could be coincidence. Three times is a pattern (*Note 1) and Rahelu’s success becomes predictable.

As a reader, I’m not a huge fan of predictability. I love twisty books, but I hate twists that exist for the sake of having twists. Twists need to feel surprising, yet inevitable (*Note 2), otherwise they feel arbitrary and unearned.

So I decided to pattern interrupt. Rahelu fails. And both the scene and the story became so much more interesting. (*Note 3)

It also meant that I could fix four of the big issues my alpha and beta readers had identified with one sequence:

1. I moved the scene with Onneja and her Augury from Chapter 1 to here, closer to the midpoint of the story, where it wouldn’t muddy up the story promises.
2. Originally, after Rahelu discovers she’s been eliminated, she decides to go looking for answers on her own. It was fine, plot-wise, but character-wise, beta readers felt it was inconsistent. Having her seriously consider the available alternatives now that Petitioning is no longer an option went a long way to showing how desperate she is.
3. Up until now, the evil cultist ritual murder in the prologue has been pretty disconnected with the main tournament plot. By putting Rahelu’s mother into Onneja’s Augury as a possible future victim, we get raised stakes, a convergence of plot promises, and a good segue into the murder mystery that forms the second half of book.
4. In the next chapter, Rahelu tries to find a way back into Petitioning. Alpha and beta readers across the board were extremely confused about where she got her idea from. Having a cryptic parting comment from Onneja cleared this up.

As a bonus, I was able to show the contrast in power/skill levels in what Augury looks like.

The Onneja scene is an example of a structural revision that significantly improves the narrative but is relatively easy to execute because it didn’t have any flow-on impacts. All I needed to do was move the scene from very early in the book (in the middle of Chapter 2) to about the midpoint of the book and expand it.

The funny thing is, even though the idea of the scene (Rahelu goes to meditate with Onneja) never changed, just about every line of prose in the scene did—it’s practically a rewrite from the ground up. (You can check out the full tracked changes from the alpha draft to final published version here.)

Finally, what makes this chapter work as a turning point is the pairing of the two scenes. Splitting off the elimination scene into the beginning of a new chapter instead of including it at the end of the previous one both figuratively and literally signals the beginning of a new arc. We answer the question raised in Chapter 1 with a resounding “no” and in exploring the fall out from that consequence, we have a new inciting incident that brings together the story promise made in the prologue. And by changing the end of the second scene to have Onneja leave (in response to the results of her Augury) instead of Rahelu (in response to time pressure to submit her Petition), we kick the plot back into high gear with raised stakes and a page turning hook.

*Note 1:

I’ve discussed how the rule of three can be very powerful in previous annotations but this is an example where I think following the rule of three detracts from the story. (back to text)

*Note 2:

This idea of “surprising, yet inevitable” comes from Joel Derfner, a fabulous songwriter and composer. I had the great fortunate of learning from him when he was teaching musical theatre at NYU. I’d written a song that contained a harmonic progression he’d really liked; it modulated from the key of F major (I) through C major (IV) to Ab major (not a related key at all).

I did not know what I was doing at the time; I went to Ab major because I was sitting at the piano, trying out all the different keys, and Ab major was the one that gave me the sound I needed for that emotional moment in the song. (back to text)

*Note 3:

Some of the themes explored in Petition is how the ideals of equality and meritocracy differ to reality and the idea of the immigrant dream.

Having Rahelu succeed here, as expected, would undermine exploration of those themes. It makes her character arc less complex. It reinforces the idea of “work hard and eventually you’ll succeed”. Rahelu becomes another example of a “success story” her society can parade around as an example of their ideals in action, when in reality things are rarely that easy.

I’ve been one of those lucky few whose path ran very smoothly. But there are many, many others who had more and greater obstacles they had to overcome before they found a way forward…and still others who never do. And thanks to the survivorship bias and our love of stories about triumphing over all adversity, we rarely hear their stories told. (back to text)

We’ve all heard the saying, ‘show, don’t tell’. It’s a piece of writing advice that’s been thrown around so much that it’s become a common catchphrase. No article or video about writing advice is complete without including “show, don’t tell”. Go to any book, filter for 1-star reviews, and there’s a high likelihood at least one of those reviews will contain some sort of critique along the lines of “there’s too much telling” or “all tell and no showing”. (Yes, I’m guilty of making this complaint too.)

I kind of hate this piece of writing advice because as a writer, it’s not very useful. Blindly following the rule of “show, don’t tell” results in pointless prose and bloated books.

Instead, I prefer to think of it as a choice you should consciously make for every event in the story:

Dramatize or summarize?

That is the question!

I went to an excellent writing workshop at NIDA once, which was about writing for the screen and stage. One of the most useful exercises I remember was a discussion of story versus plot. In the context of that discussion, ‘story’ meant ‘a bare, chronological succession of events’ and ‘plot’ meant ‘how the story is presented by the writer’. Or, more specifically, ‘events as ordered and connected in a drama; smaller than story; subject to authorial will’.

One exercise to explore this point was to picked somebody famous and think about how we would construct a plot around the story of their life. What should the plot be about? Their rise to fame? Their fall from grace? Their legacy?

How you answer that question changes the scope of your plot. Something like Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (musical, 2 hours and 30 minutes excluding intermission) requires different decisions on what to dramatize and what to narrate versus Breaking Bad (television series, 62 episodes, total run time of 61.3 hours, each episode sitting between 47-53 minutes without ads) versus Whiplash (feature film, 106 minutes) versus Nghi Vo’s When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (novella, 126 pages) versus Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (standalone novel, 272 pages, mostly first person epistolary) versus Janny Wurts’s The Curse of the Mistwraith (first in 11-book series novel, 233k words).

Which brings me back to Petition: so far, it’s Rahelu’s story about Petitioning the Houses. We open on Petition Day and we’ve followed her POV closely, event by event, as she goes through the Petitioning process.

At the end of Chapters 10 and 11, Rahelu has three spheres. The expectation is: three spheres, invitations from three Houses, therefore surely three scenes showing the three audiences.

So why did I end up skipping over House Isca to focus on Houses Issolm and Ideth instead?

Well, I had a problem: I didn’t know what I would write in a scene between Rahelu and Elder Nhirom (who, honestly, along with Elder Anathwan didn’t exist as a character.)

That’s not exactly news; I never know exactly what I’m going to write before I write it. I can outline all I want but the moment I open up a blank document in side-by-side view next to my painstaking outline of all the beats I’m supposed to hit, my discovery writing brain laughs and laughs and laughs and then just writes whatever the hell it wants to instead. (It wasn’t like I knew how the Issolm or Ideth audiences would turn out either.)

No, the problem was I did not know what the conflict would be in the Isca audience. And conflict—at least, when it comes to the style that is preferred in genre fiction today—conflict is the engine that drives the story.

No conflict? No scene.

No compelling conflict? Super lame scene.

The thing with House Isca is, everything you know up to this point you’ve learned based on Dharyas’s example—and you’ve probably surmised that Rahelu would not be well-suited to House Isca. Which means, you can also probably guess at how that audience is going to go. Unless I plan to subvert those expectations—or make the way the events unfold extremely entertaining—dramatizing (a.k.a. showing) the scene on page doesn’t do anything to serve the plot.

Don’t get me wrong; I could have written an Isca audience scene set in Nhirom’s workshop—but I would have had to introduce some other form of conflict because “Rahelu is clueless” is not a conflict; it’s a descriptor. 1500 words about Rahelu walking into Elder Nhirom’s workshop and having no clue what to do with her wire sphere is not interesting. You’d just be reading pages and pages of description about what Elder Nhirom’s workshop looks like (not that Rahelu would even have the vocabulary to describe what she’s seeing)…and for what purpose? It doesn’t contribute anything to the plot.

To turn that descriptor into conflict, I would need Rahelu to do something to the status quo. Maybe she disrespects the Elder and causes trouble for Tsenjhe. Maybe thugs break into his workshop during the audience and she saves his life. Maybe she decides to cheat and he catches her. Whatever it is, the characters need to end the scene in a different place to where they started otherwise there’s no advancement of plot/character/setting—just a lot of pointless words you could have skipped without missing anything.

Far better to summarize the Isca audience in ~250 words instead.

That frees up word count to compare and contrast House Issolm and House Ideth in how Elder Anathwan and Atriarch Mere Ideth’s approaches vary which builds on what you’ve already seen before.

I’m not entirely happy with those two scenes; I mean, let’s call them what they are: thinly-disguised world building exposition dumps about the Houses. But I hope that you found them somewhat organic and interesting to read without feeling like I’ve shoved a bunch of words I’ve copied and pasted straight from my world building wiki.