writing progress

My dry spell is over. I just found the key to Book 21 that had been missing! It was quite a lightbulb moment in writing tonight. The events of this epiphany won't happen until near the end. A lot of other stuff has to come in between, but it will be worthwhile for readers to see exactly how the pieces of the plan come together in the ultimate trick.

A lot of that other stuff I have felt, or did feel, inadequate to write, which gave me some hangups. This book, ARMOR, is a complexity of L'Ni's intelligence and planning. It's not like SOUL SHADOW, which was Nya searching for the key to his entrapment by the creature in his mind. I didn't have that completely planned out but pantsed a lot of it, unlike I thought I had with this. Trying to write a story to reveal the extraordinary psychological understanding of a character of L'Ni's caliber is like playing chess against a master when you can't win as an amateur. It's intimidating.

No, I'm not that bad. Okay, yes, I am bad at chess. I'm actually very sensitive to reading people's body language, tone of voice, and specific word usage, picking up on subtle cues that most people miss, much like L'Ni, which is how I developed that aspect of his character. However, he's incredibly intelligent and I've been able to get by without having to go too far out of my comfort zone without breaking that.

The big thing about planning a story like this is that it requires careful plotting to make sure nothing is overlooked. I wouldn't be able to write myself out of a corner in a story like this. I can't pants anything like I've done with so many of the other stories. I have to think ten steps or more in advance like L'Ni would do in this very serious plotting he's devised in Book 21, or it would all fall apart. To use an appropriate metaphor, he's playing the series game Trellix but on a life or death level. What he's doing is not a game, but the metaphor fits. He's moved all the pieces into place for a far greater trick or manipulation than even Zaer could devise.

I never imagined how that fictional game was going to relate to so many aspects of this series.

Anyway, that's all I can reveal without giving anything away. Book 21 is the result of something discovered by a character in Book 20. Like all the books in the series, this builds on what's come before and is something hinted that must now be resolved. That stress of trying to keep a growing history of events in mind contributes to some of the issues I might have in writing, but I love the epiphanies that make this so much fun!

Thanks for reading!