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…
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…
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…
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 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,…