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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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: 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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

One of the decisions I’d made from the very beginning was that Petition was going to be single POV. I didn’t want to fall into the typical epic fantasy author trap of POV bloat that would land me in revision hell; I wanted to write a clean draft of a tightly-focused narrative. (By the way, I’m sitting here writing this annotation after completing a first read through of the rough draft for Supplicant—which has…issues. Turns out that the choice of a single POV doesn’t necessarily help; it was the strict tournament plot structure and Rahelu’s singular goal that kept everything…

Chapter 10 is interesting to analyze in terms of its construction. On the surface, it seems like a pretty boring scene. It’s just Rahelu, Lhorne, and Dharyas chilling out over lunch in a tavern with the rest of the Ideth applicants. Not much plot happens. That’s deliberate. In Jim Butcher’s scene-and-sequel terms (though I don’t think he was the originator of this particular framework) this chapter functions as a sequel. The scene—being the challenges—was in Chapters 6 through 10. (I did not, however, follow Butcher’s suggested structure. I don’t actively refer to any particular plotting framework when I’m writing new…

Chapter 9 is the third-longest chapter in the entire book at around 6,700 words. (The longest chapter, if you’re curious, is Chapter 22 which has the action climax of the book. The second-longest is Chapter 21 which is the emotional build-up.) I remember being incredibly nervous while writing the first draft because this is the first, big action sequence. Unlike Fonda Lee, I am not a black belt. I do not have any combat experience. (A semester of dabbling in tae kwon do and archery and one trial class on kendo from a Groupon don’t count.) I enjoy a good…

The main problem I had created for myself with the first challenge is that while scavenger hunts can be fun to do, they are not fun to read. I’d also set myself up to have twenty tokens in play—thank goodness I came to my senses during revisions and whittled them down to ten. I had a couple of options: In the end, I tried to do all of the above. Conflict is the propulsion behind any plot; without it, all you have is an ordered sequence of events. So my number one priority is always to make sure there is…

I honestly didn’t put a lot of thought into deciding what the challenges were: I simply wanted something that was action-heavy, that would showcase the magic system, and that would require teamwork. “Scavenger hunt” fit, so I went with it. By now, we’ve seen most of the magic system at play in basic ways already: I’ve introduced all of these elements without explanation for two reasons. First, I hate infodumps as a reader. After reading Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen (where exposition does not, as a rule, exist for anything), I became hyper-sensitized to noticing exposition when it…

A lot of this book was written by accident and this chapter is the perfect example of discovery writing in action. It has two scenes: an opening scene where Rahelu’s mother is helping her prepare for the challenges and a closing scene at the Guild when the challenges begin. Rahelu and her mother In the original draft, Chapter 5 didn’t exist, so this scene came straight right after Tsenjhe and Keshwar accept Rahelu’s Petition. It’s the exact same thing we saw in Chapter 1: Rahelu getting ready for the day, her father leaving early to the sea, and her mother…

One of the most unintuitive things I have discovered about myself as a writer is that I am, apparently, incapable of sticking to an outline. I just can’t do it, despite my tendency to being structured and methodical in my approach to most things in life. I’ll make comprehensive lists of things that should happen in the plot and map out my turning points, then I’ll open up a blank document and my brain will go, “Awww, how adorable, but actually no, we’re writing about this instead.” At the same time, it’s hard for me to start from absolutely nothing.…

In contrast to the previous chapter, this next chapter was one of the easiest chapters to write. Very little changed from the original draft to the published version. When I say very little changed, I don’t mean that in terms of actual count of words added, deleted, and moved around. I’m more referring to the significance of the revisions. Since there were no significant revisions for this chapter, it is probably a good place to discuss how I do revisions generally, and what happens between typing “THE END” on the first draft to hitting “PUBLISH”. That’s because you can get…

If there was one chapter that summed up my experience of writing Petition, it was this chapter, which has the dubious honor of being the most revised chapter in the entire book. For the most part, I write very clean first drafts. That doesn’t mean they don’t require editing—they do!—but I generally have a good feel for whether or not something is ‘working’ after I write it. Thankfully, this is most of my scenes, most of the time, but every now and then, I will be stuck with a scene that I know sucks and that I have no idea…

I always went into writing with the belief that I am an outliner. I’m the kind of person who lives their life according to a cascading collection of one-, three-, five-, and ten-year plans, where each group of short-term goals feeds into a carefully considered set of long-term goals. But in actual fact, I’m not. I’ll sit there, plan an outline, then throw it out when it’s time to put my fingers to the keyboard. (You’d think I’d’ve realized this earlier; if I compare every ten-year plan I ever made to how my life unfolded, very little of those plans…

This is the second-most-revised chapter in the entire book. There’s so much pressure to have a great, hooky first sentence. That pressure extends to the first paragraph, the first page, the first chapter… (To be honest, the pressure’s there for the whole first book, and then every book that follows. Writing is hard.) But there’s something about that first sentence that creates additional pressure. The blank page holds an endless promise: you could write the next The Lord of the Rings, the next A Song of Ice and Fire, the next Malazan Book of the Fallen, the next Stormlight Archive,…

Prologues have a bad rap. There are readers out there who have been so badly burned by bad prologues that they will not read any more books with prologues. (I’m not one of them. As a rule, I like my epic fantasy with prologues.) But this was my debut novel. I was going to have enough trouble finding willing readers; I needed to do everything I could to signal to those I could find that they wouldn’t run into any of the usual fantasy author hazards with my book: poor pacing; POVs bloat; and of course, bad use of prologues.…