It’s now 2018, and I’m 16k words into The Xiaran Mongrel, the finale of my Annals of the Bitch Queen trilogy. This is going to be divided into two acts, each at around 90-100k each, so…quite a doorstopper.
Anyone who has finished The Agartes Epilogues know I take finales very seriously. Not only do plotlines have to come together and get resolved, I also want to make sure the characters have a reasonable amount of growth. Unless I specifically say otherwise, my planned trilogies function as one book. Each novel has a separate “arc” which are then separated into acts, but they are meant to follow one after another, with each arc increasing in tension and stakes until the end.
I’m a firm believer in judging stories as a whole. There are things you can judge from the beginning–writing style, or technical stuff like basic competency with the craft–but I feel that the story itself, especially character development, needs time. And novels like mine, which takes huge liberties with limited point-of-views and unreliable narrators, take lots of time. This is supposed to be a journey you take with the characters, so the beginning reads very differently from the end–character growth, epiphanies, these all play a part in the direction and tone of the story.
Annals of the Bitch Queen has been such a journey. In the beginning of The Wolf of Oren-yaro, you have a woman who is blinded by her arrogance and her passions and is very sure of the world she lives in. In The Ikessar Falcon, she is running through the haze of confusion of a world turned upside-down, learning more and more about how things actually are as she attempts to find her place in the grand scheme of things again. The Xiaran Mongrel is now a culmination of all of the things she’s learned, of piecing things together and then coming to those final, harrowing conclusions that’ll drive her to the climax of the trilogy.
Which is why when I market this book, I don’t exactly say “this is all the story is about.” What I say is “Here is where we begin.” Which is probably why I do very badly with readers who don’t trust me, which I guess was the risk I took choosing to write like this.
Still, I’m looking forward to bringing this story to an end. It’s been a hell of a ride so far. Here’s to hoping the next 2-3 months of writing doesn’t kill me!
