Indeed do many things come to pass

Posted by skzb

http://dreamcafe.com/2026/05/01/a-long-and-probably-boring-process-post/

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I have no idea if this will be at all interesting to anyone, but I just wrote a chapter that gives me an excellent opportunity to talk about my process. I should note that this book, Chreotha, is episodic (at least so far). That means that, a) the process of creating this chapter is nicely isolated from the book as a whole, and, therefore, b) what I’m about to say will contain intense—like, total—spoilers for one chapter, but not for the whole book. I’ve marked where the spoilers start.

For those who want to read the story itself before, after, or instead of reading the process post, Tor Books kindly gave me permission to publish it, so it can be found here.

It is commonplace to divide writers into “plotters” and “pantsers.” Many writers, perhaps most, don’t fall neatly into those categories. Certainly I don’t–I’ve done everything from having a fully detailed outline before writing the first word to not knowing what would happen in the next paragraph for most of the book. Usually it is somewhere in between. But this chapter of this book is full on “seat of the pants” writing, and what is unusual is that I can trace every step of how it ended up the way it did. It expresses the process of “pantsing” a novel in microcosm.

It began on Discord, chatting with a fellow who is working on a game. The game is in English, which is a second language for him; and while his English is good enough to have no trouble communicating, it isn’t good enough for the dialog or the prose of the game he’s working on. So, what the hell, I agreed to help him.

I spent several hours going over the narration and dialog of his game, fixing the odd phrasings (I wasn’t paying much attention to the game itself, but I think it’s post-apocalypse of some kind). And it was the odd phrasings that caught me. The particular mistakes were fascinating, and made me wonder about things I’d never thought about: why do we say, “in the afternoon, in the morning, in the evening” but “at night”? Why can’t we say, “I’ve been here since a while?” Why is it “many things” but “much activity”? Why does it feel wrong to say, “I’ve one here” but feels right to say “I’ve been there?” And so on. Sometimes I knew the answer, sometimes I didn’t. But at some point I realized I was geeking out on his errors.

*** Spoilers start here ***

At that point (I think it was around March 22), I was just finishing up chapter 5 of Chreotha, and had no clue what was going to happen in chapter 6, but I thought it would be a lot of fun to create a character who didn’t speak Northwestern and made all of the errors I had just spent a few hours correcting. Chreotha has been gradually moving forward in Vlad’s timeline, and I’d gotten up to the year 242 PI, so it worked out well. It pretty much had to be set in South Adrilankha, and at a time when Vlad was over there a lot, so I set it around the time of Teckla/Phoenix, keeping the dates vague enough to make it unlikely to contradict myself—Alexx can figure out the exact dates at his leisure.

So, the guy (his name is Jules; turns out not to be his real name, but I didn’t know that then) and Vlad had a conversation with Jules having language issues, and it was as much fun to write as I’d thought it would be. But…what was there to talk about? Well, obviously, the uprising. What would a stranger—that is, someone who didn’t speak the language—have to say about it? Probably that he wasn’t able to figure out what it was about. But, why ask Vlad? Oh, hey, let’s say he got caught up in the fighting and was injured. Sure, let’s break his leg. Snap. It’s done. Now he has something to ask Vlad about.

Vlad, who isn’t quite as much of an asshole as he likes to think he is, helps him limp over to a physicker–an Easterner. The physicker recognizes Vlad because she knows his grandfather. Why did that happen? In order to give the physicker a bit of dialog; I had no plans for that. But then, I had no plans for anything.

Okay, Jules has been delivered, Vlad heads back home, and that section (around 1000 words or so) is done. Now what?

Well, it being around Teckla/Phoenix, I guess I have to send him back to South Adrilankha (after klava, of course; I’m not a monster). So he heads over there, and, me having no clue where the bloody story is supposed to go, I had the physicker meet him on the Stone Bridge. Was she looking for him, or was it an accident? Well, I’ll have them chat, and maybe I’ll find out.

I didn’t find out. The dialog went nowhere. She started to ask him a favor, and, nope, brain supplied nothing. Then she started to criticize his profession, and it just felt stupid. I was annoyed—I go to all the work to invent the damned physicker, and she gives me no help at all. I wanted to kill her. So I killed her.

I went back to the beginning and rewrote the opening so her house would be somewhere he might walk past by accident (made sense that it was prominent since that’s how Vlad knew to bring Jules there). Then I deleted all the stuff on the bridge, had him walk over to South Adrilankha, pass the house, and see black bunting draped from a window. It took him a moment, but he did eventually remember what black bunting means to Easterners, and he put 2 and 2 together and went in.

At this point, I was pretty sure Jules had killed the physicker. The “why” came instantly, like a drop of cliche from the brow of Zeus. My working theory is that he was an informer who had been discovered and beaten by the insurgents, and that somehow the physicker had learned who he really was, so Jules had killed her. I was aware that I could be wrong about any or all of that, but it was enough to keep me putting words out there.

Vlad left the physicker’s house, and tried to get his temper under control. I tried to decide if him being pissed off was enough justification for him failing to ask the grieving widower any questions, decided it wasn’t, so I went back and inserted a few lines of dialog. Of course, he didn’t get any useful answers, because where’s the fun in that? And also, of course, if he did know something useful, I could go back and insert it later, because writing without an outline means never having to say you’re sorry.

And at that point, boom! I had an outline for the rest of the chapter. Not very detailed, and highly subject to change, but there it was:

Determine it was definitely Jules who killed her

Speak with some Easterners who mention breaking the leg of an informer

Find out where informers report (Dragon Wing? Yendi Wing?)

Plant a false report just to fuck things up for the Empire a bit

Kill Jules

SF writer Marissa Lingen coined the phrase, “Writer Proprioception,” and I think that is an outstanding term for it—you just kind of feel where in the story you are. Like, no, I can’t have that happen yet, or, there needs to be something here because otherwise it just won’t feel right. So this was a good time to check in with how it felt. It seemed okay, so far, and the balance of what had happened with what was going to happen felt good.

How about word count? I don’t care about it a great deal, but I’m always curious. I’ve got about 2000 words of this chapter. A chapter can be as long or short as it feels like, but most often they come in somewhere around 5000 words. So, did I feel 2/5 of the way through this? It felt like a bit less than that so far, but that is something to keep in mind but not worry about.

So, onward. Last we saw Vlad, he was leaning against the physicker’s house trying to get his temper under control. Obviously, he was going to look for Jules, but he had, at this point, no idea how to find him—because, you know, neither did I. So I set him toward the house that Cawti and her people were using as a headquarters. On the way, I passed by a face-off between Phoenix Guards and conscripted Teckla on one side, and insurgents on the other. I pulled on some experience here—if you’ve ever been at a protest staring down the cops or the National Guard, wondering if something is going to set things off, there is an indescribable tension that isn’t like anything else I’ve experienced, and I wanted to try to capture some of that tension and transfer it into Vlad and into the reader.

I got past that, and the next sentence I wrote started, “I had a destination in mind…” I don’t know about you, but to me, a sentence that starts like that implies he doesn’t reach his destination. Sometimes I like to flip expectations with stuff like this, but this time I just let it carry me forward to see if something interesting happened.

Before deciding that, however, I went back. It was bugging me that I didn’t know how the physicker had been killed. I mean, I knew—the widower had already said that it was a blow to the head with a heavy object. But WHAT heavy object? That was bugging me. So I backed up and had a few papers blow around so the guy could remember the heavy piece of polished obsidian used as a paper-weight, and note that it was missing. I used the opportunity to add in some bits about the stench of South Adrilankha and about the ability of witches to counteract the stench because those two things expressed a lot about South Adrilankha for me, and because, well, forgive me a little pretentiousness, it felt symbolic. I also made a mental note that maybe if Vlad returns the paperweight, that could make for a decent ending.

That done, I went back again, and gave the widower a name, because by this time he had enough dialog that referring to him as, “the widower” or “the guy who’d let me in” was getting clumsy. A quick visit to Google and “Hungarian boys names” later, and he was Lachi (transliteration of “Laci,” short for László). Later, I checked the pronunciation and changed it to Lotsi, which is a closer transliteration. And now I realize that it rhymes perfectly with “Nazi” which is, I dunno, a bit heavy-handed, so maybe change it back?

At this point, I had 2800 words and the feeling that this was going to be a long chapter.

Okay, so, how much am I stretching credulity for Vlad to just happen to overhear about an informer’s leg being broken? Put like that, quite a bit; but what if it is something that lots of people are talking about? Okay, yeah, I think I can get away with that.

It crossed my mind that Jules might not be an informer, he might be a provocateur. The downside of that is that, with the events of the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis still fresh in my mind, it might be hitting too close to home and come off as didactic. Maybe. I let it bubble around in my head while Vlad talked to a group of Easterners who’d heard of the incident. I had fun with the drunk.

Meanwhile, I realized that Vlad hadn’t eaten anything for a while. But standing right in the heart of the district with all the unrest, there was literally nowhere for him to eat, so I had him grumble about it a bit; that would have to do.

I had Vlad ask Aliera who an informer would report to, because Vlad figured Aliera would have more recent information than Sethra. Next stop was to the Wiki—Lyorn Records. I spent some quality time researching my own previous work until I was able to determine where such an informer might report. I decided it would be Third Floor Relic, and so Aliera informed Vlad. Aliera, or course, had determined this by asking Sethra, because it is hard to pass up a chance to make Vlad feel foolish.

There was the question, then, of if I was giving Vlad information that he supposedly only learned the first time in Orca. Being lazy (and not right now having access to my own books, they being a storage locker) I dealt with this problem by making a mental note to ask Magicjon about it while making sure the information Vlad got didn’t have as much detail is he’d get in Orca, and set the problem aside.

Now Vlad had a destination, and the chapter was about 3750 words.

He returned to the City, stopping for a hot meat pastry because, as I said above, I’m not a monster. I brought him to the Palace, got him near the Third Floor Relic room, and stopped dead. Now what? He was not going to randomly run into Jules, and if he randomly met a member of Third Floor Relic he wouldn’t even know. A very nice wall I’ve run into. Well, it always happens at some point. I might have to go delete everything from when Vlad decides to go to the Palace, but before doing that, I figured to spend some time seeing if I could get past that wall.

I’ve mentioned before that when I hit a wall, I never break through it: I just push a little, then a little more, then a little more, and at some point I notice that it’s behind me. So, time to settle in and start pushing. This was liable to be several days for very few words.

First push: Vlad makes an author intrusive remark about having no plan. Second push: a brief summary of the situation. Then I fell back on what all the experts say you should do when stuck: play some computer solitaire. Okay, not all the experts say that. But I did, and let me say in passing: I may not be a great writer, or a great musician, or a great poker player, but if you ever go up against me in 2-suit Spider Solitaire, you’d better bring your A game. In any case, I got push 3: Vlad realizes just exactly where and who he is, and suddenly gets nervous.

One of my favorite things to do are digressions: just stop dead and explain something to the reader. I felt very much like doing that here, because sometimes it helps get the wheels turning again and because I always enjoy it, but I didn’t have anything to digress about—I mean, if you’re going to stop cold and just infodump the reader, it has to be necessary, or at a minimum useful information at that time, and it has to be fun. (H/T Teresa Nielsen Hayden) So, nope. No infodump.

Push 4: A quick check-in with Loiosh.

Push 5: A Teckla can emerge from the room; that isn’t unreasonable. And the only reason for a Teckla (who doesn’t work at the Palace) to be there was he was an informer reporting in, so Vlad now knows at least which room he’s looking for. And there will of course be someone in it, although I don’t think Vlad wants to meet that person. Maybe do something clever with Loiosh and Rocza? Yeah, they’ve been pretty neglected in this story so far, and Loiosh has been complaining about it. Okay, then.

And, lookie there! The wall is behind me! That was, by the way, three irritating days to do all that trivial nonsense to get me past the wall, but it worked and I was on my way, with a plan and everything. The plan was to find information on informers, get some names, and deliver those names to Jules as leaders of the uprising, resulting in the Empire deciding Jules was a traitor and getting him killed in a deliciously ironic way. I now had a pretty clear vision all the way to the end.

I had locked all the doors near the Imperial Library, where Vlad was waiting, so now, to carry out my plan, I had to go unlock them all. Amazing how many doors you can unlock by deleting one sentence and replacing it with another. After that, it was just a matter of opening a door, letting the jhereg in, and running like hell. Vlad did, waited, talked to Loiosh, entered the room that he did not know was called “Third Floor Relic,” got what he was after (names of some of the informers and Jules’ real name and address; for the informers I chose one Teckla, two Fenarians, and a German; also decided to make Jules a Czech), and he was out of there, clear of the Palace, and safe. Safeish.

At Loiosh’s request, he ate some shrimp to celebrate, because I was craving shrimp. That night I made something sort of halfway between shrimp fra diavolo and shrimp primavera, which satisfied my craving, while Vlad had some fried shrimp with lemon butter which satisfied Loiosh’s.

The next step was finding Jules’s house. Now, Dragaeran technology is all over the map, because one thing I enjoy is playing with, “Okay, magic would have slowed down the development of that technology, speeded up the development of that technology, and not effected the other one.” And, to make matters worse (= more fun = better) there is often a difference between Dragaeran levels and Human levels of technology; all of which is to say, the equivalent time when the Vlad novels are set could be anywhere from 12th Century Western Europe to 19th Century North Africa, with occasional dips as far as the 20th Century, depending on what we’re discussing.

What does this have to do with addresses? Well, time to hit Wikipedia again. Numbering houses started with the distribution of property ownership in France in the 16th Century, but didn’t start getting organized in Europe for another couple of hundred years. What with messengers, and some form of postal service, I figured Dragaerans were there; but Easterners were not. So, no addresses. So, a few minutes to figure out how to describe the location of a house before street addresses were a thing. That done, I had to go back and insert that into the information about Jules.

And from there, it just sort of wrote itself all the way to the end, ending with Vlad finding the murder weapon and deciding to return it to Lachi. I finished the first draft at 11:51PM on April 16th. It came in at 6274 words.

Then a quick pass of revisions.

> It’s after dark, Steve. You know it is after dark because the neighbor complains about being woken up. So, hey, how about doing the light spell BEFORE you describe the Easterner? Wouldn’t that be smart?

> Okay, minor, but funny: I stared at a sentence a long time trying to figure out what it meant before realizing that “patience” should have been “patients.” I chuckled. I’m glad I’m able to amuse myself.

> Threw in a reference to Norathar because it needed to be there. Then I deleted it because it really didn’t.

> Sometimes I words out

Word count after revision was 6349.

The whiskey bell rings two hours before bed time. Bed time, right then in my whacky, ever-shifting sleep schedule, was 3am. I finished revisions at 23:55. And it was the 17th! How perfect is that? If I believed in omens, that would have been one.

In the evening of April 30 I had a zoom meeting with my critique group: Emma Bull, Pamela Dean, and Will Shetterly. They liked the chapter, but, as always, had some suggestions, none of which I could disagree with. I won’t mention the bits they liked, because that isn’t the point of this post, and because if I started bragging about the good stuff I’d lose my status as a card-carrying Minnesotan.

The next day I set about implementing them: I added a bit more to the walk to the physicker’s house; the idea was to establish more of a connection between Vlad and Jules, and I don’t know if I accomplished that, but I think it was worth it just for a little bit more of Vlad being Vlad.

I also slowed things down a bit with the physicker. In the original version, Vlad learns that later another patient came in and that’s how Jules overhears him being described as an informer; but there was no reason not to have the patients there already. This required adding a bit of dialog establishing that it was Jules who killed her, but I wanted a bit more anyway, so that was fine.

Another comment was that I rushed through the scene at the physicker’s after the killing; in particular, there should be more dialog with Noish-pa, resulting in more emotional investment in Vlad for getting Jules. Or, as Emma put it, an opportunity for Vlad to feel things he didn’t expect to feel.

I’d thrown in a brief paragraph about a potential tactic for dealing with an enemy, but it never actually came up, and it went nowhere, so as per Emma’s suggestion I deleted it.

Will correctly pointed out that the entire second half was too rushed—I think that tends to happen when pantsing after I finally figure out what’s going on, so I went back and gave the story room to breath.

As I was scanning through making the fixes, I came across the conversation with the drunk and his friends where Vlad learned that Jules was an informer. It seemed a little too terse, and in addition I enjoyed the group, so I added a little more dialog, both to establish that the physicker was well known and liked, thus raising the emotional stakes a bit, and because it gave me a chance to use some Hungarian curses. I mean, how can you not love, “May a snail fall into his intestines”? (Or, if you prefer, Hogy a csiga essék a beledbe. I miss my dad; he’d have loved that.) Another great one is, “May a guitar grow in your stomach and cancer strum it,” but I didn’t use that one.

I was also told that Aliera’s response to Vlad’s wisecrack was weak and un-Aliera-like. Yeah, I realized that had been nagging at me, too at an unconscious level, so I kicked it up a notch.

Pamela pointed out that earlier, Vlad is concerned about Cawti, and then once he gets involved in heading to the Palace, forgets about her, so I sent Rocza off to keep track of her and protect her.

Emma made the observation that when Vlad is in South Adrilankha he resists being an Easterner, and when he is the City he resists being Dragaeran. I’d never noticed that before, but she’s right, so on reaching the Palace I needed to play that up just a tiny bit, which I did by making a point of how everyone he passed was taller and stronger than he was. And then he made of point of stroking his mustache. I think that might do it.

Arriving at the Palace, I got the suggestion, I think from Will, to add more sensory details, and to give the reader a bit of the feeling of the place. So I jumped in after Push 4 and provided some details as well as mentioning the kind of breeze you sometimes get in big buildings, which I threw in as a callback to the opening of Jhereg. Sense details would have been useful when I was pushing the wall, too; why didn’t I think of that?

Next, a minor tweak to make it clear when Vlad breaks the window that he’s breaking the window. I almost always remember, when there is a glass window, to mention that fact, as glass is unusual and expensive, but this time I forgot, so I put that in.

Next, there was some confusion about exactly what Loiosh was doing, so I slowed that part down a bit and put in a few more details.

Last thing was some uncertainty that the Empire would do what Vlad wanted them to do, so I stuck in a mention of giving the name to Cawti as a failsafe.

Now, this is not actually the final form; this is pretty close to the form I’ll submit it in (my critique group will have another crack at it when they go over the whole book), but then my editor, Claire Eddy, will probably have some things to say about it. Anyone curious enough can then compare the version here with the published version and see what changes they suggested.

Then I went through the whole thing one more time. It was interesting that, when I just starting, I wrote that the events took “a couple of days,” when in fact I had no clue what would happen or how long it would take, but in fact, yeah, the whole thing lasted a couple of days.

I also added a little to the line in “Fenarian” that Jules says when saying he can’t speak it. I had him say “I am a visitor here” but get it wrong. The Hungarian word for visitor is látogató; change the g to r and you get “watchtower” so that’s what he says. As I said above, it is good that I can amuse myself.

This version was finished around 2PM EDT on May first, and hit about 7000 words.

And that’s how I do it. Sometimes.

Please note: I am NOT asking for feedback on the story itself; in particular, I am not asking for a critique. My writers group will go over it again, and so will my editor. Unless you are one of those people, please do not offer suggestions; I get unreasonably snarky about that, for which I apologize.

http://dreamcafe.com/2026/05/01/a-long-and-probably-boring-process-post/

https://dreamcafe.com/?p=8361