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 survived their encounters with reality.)

In my penultimate year of high school, I’d taken an elective in drama. I don’t remember much of the curriculum, other than what my teacher taught us about the rules of good improvisation: when your improvisation partner makes an ‘offer’, accepting and building upon that offer generally results in a better storytelling outcome.

That mindset was invaluable to me as I was drafting this book. Most of Petition was discovery-written, with many of the characters and plot lines springing into being during the writing process, prompted by my use of the “try/fail” cycle.

Here are my original notes for this chapter:

Where’s the discussion of scene 1.2, you ask? We’ll talk about that when we get to the annotations for Chapter 13! But this is what the opening of the market scene looked like in the very first draft:

There was no competitive parental sniping between Rahelu’s mother and Hzin. Bzel didn’t exist. I hadn’t figured out any of the worldbuilding logistics around commercial selling of fresh seafood when refrigeration technology (or magic) isn’t commonly available—I hadn’t even named my fantasy fish. All of those things were added in during later revisions.

Even so, the opening chapters were some of the fastest chapters to write. My writing progress tracker says I was writing new prose at a rate of 926–1,154 words per hour. If only I could write that fast all the time!

The first draft of the House-born sequence with Nheras came in at 1,995 words, which is on the short side for one of my action sequences. Here’s a copy of that scene, complete with all my XXX placeholders and inline comments bemoaning my terrible writing.

Much of that draft remains in the published version. But one of artifacts of discovery writing is that I did not know what kind of story I was writing. I did not yet know the details of the main conflicts or who the main characters, other than Rahelu, were going to be—let alone what their motivations were.

As a result, the first half of this book needed heavy structural revision. Here’s the tracked changes comparison between the original draft and the published version. Surprisingly, the revisions turned out to be less about changing story beats and more about fleshing out characters and adding in extra details to foreshadow later events and/or to reinforce themes.

Bzel

The little moment with Bzel and Rahelu’s almost-Evocation was written after I wrote the original prologue, which I subsequently cut and replaced with a new prologue. That ruined the reversal of perspectives you get in the ending, so I kept this moment here to try and maintain some of that symmetry.

Lhorne and Cseryl cameo

This was my attempt to make the ending of the book less weird, structurally speaking. (I’ll discuss the structural weirdness in more detail when we get to the annotations for Chapters 24 and onwards.) I’m not entirely sure it works, but it does lay some groundwork for later chapters with not a whole lot of word count so I left it in.

Deepening Nheras’s character

Like the vast majority of the cast, Nheras wasn’t a planned character—she popped up when I needed to give Rahelu an obvious antagonist early on. But once she became part of the narrative, I didn’t want to make her a disposable antagonist.

In the first draft, Nheras reads like a typical bully/‘Mean Girls’ trope character. That’s deliberate—we’re in Rahelu’s POV after all—but it’s also a problem. There are moments where she borders on being an outright caricature. (Is there anything that screams ‘cartoon villain’ more that a character siccing their cronies onto the protagonist with some sort of variation on “get ’em, boys”?)

I hate reading one-note characters. They make it difficult for me to suspend my sense of disbelief in the first place and they rob scenes of emotional impact. Why should I care if the funny sidekick dies or if the antagonist is overcome if they’ve been nothing more than cardboard cut-outs?

(You can’t necessarily do this with every character. I didn’t have the page count to give Bhemol and Kiran more depth: Rahelu views them as Nheras’s thugs and that’s all you need to know about them. Narratively speaking, they’re there to underscore the main conflict in the scene, which is the Nheras/Rahelu rivalry. I could have added more moments to show that there’s more to Bhemol and Kiran than being bullies, but that’s not the story I was trying to tell.)

Powerful emotional moments have to be earned. For me, the most memorable scenes—the ones that evoke strong, raw emotional responses when I’m reading—are always rooted in conflicts between multi-dimensional characters.

Easy to point out where an author has gone wrong, but hard to do right. I tried to do a couple of things with the expanded Nheras moments in this chapter:

• Create the sense of five years of history between Nheras and Rahelu.
• Let the reader come to the conclusion that there’s another side to the story—one where Nheras and Rahelu’s roles are reversed.
• Hint at Nheras’s motives and her relative standing amongst the other House-born.

I tried very hard to stay away from doing this via clumsy exposition. Not only because I hate it, but because we’re in Rahelu’s POV. She views all House-born as a monolithic entity and has neither the inclination nor the opportunity to learn anything more. Anything I wanted to convey, I needed to convey via implication and subtext.

Did it work? It’s a little heavier-handed than I would like, but I think so. At the very least, the published version is far better than the draft.

Tone and story promises

I had two big problems with my draft.

First (and most significant) was the two halves of my book read like totally different stories. It begins with essentially a tournament arc—Rahelu and her Petition—then halfway through, it takes a left turn into a murder mystery. (More on this in the annotation on the prologue and the annotation on Chapter 3.)

Second problem was the incompleteness of tone promises and consistency of tone throughout the opening chapters. I did not want somebody picking up this book, thinking it was YA fantasy, and then subsequently being horrified by the swearing, violence, and sexual content.

Expanding the exchange between the Ilyn applicants and Rahelu served a few purposes.

1. Spreading the dialogue between Nheras, Bhemol, and Kiran conveyed a better sense of their dynamic and established some distinctions in their respective characters.

2. In the beta read draft, Kiran already had an expanded role, though the scene was less sexually explicit:

I think Kiran’s implication here is clear but some of my beta readers were still caught off guard by the last scene in Chapter 11, which sets up two other scenes in Chapter 22. (The end of Chapter 11 is roughly 46,000 words into the book, which is far too late to be setting up tone and story promises. Those all need to be in place by the end of Chapter 2, which is about where the sample chapters on Amazon end.)

The other issue is, while we get Rahelu’s reaction, we don’t understand how she feels about the situation or the power dynamics in the world. The two additional paragraphs in the published version help bridge that gap.

3. Finally, there was an opportunity here to draw a clearer parallel between Tsenjhe and Rahelu, which is important for setting up some of Rahelu’s later choices.

Ending

In addition to splitting off the whole sequence from Market Square to Rahelu’s Petition being destroyed into its own chapter, I also changed the ending based on alpha reader feedback.

Originally, this sequence ended with Rahelu being devastated by the destruction of her Petition and Nheras stalking off. It’s a real downer of an ending and the version that I, and a few of my beta readers, personally prefer.

But when I stepped back to take a look at the overall structure of the book, I noticed my tendency to end chapters on emotional gut punches—perhaps because I conceive of them as self-contained arcs. Many of my early drafts lacked an explicit hook into the next chapter which was a recurring piece of feedback from my alpha readers. (The most common reaction was ‘what now?’ but not in a way that compelled them to go on to the next chapter.) This kind of chapter ending (mostly) works for the second half of the book as, by then, you’ve become invested in the characters.

But when we’re only at Chapter 2 and still in the sample chapters, it’s a big risk to take. I don’t have the marketing budget or the marketing department of a traditional publishing house behind me. Every reader I can convince to visit the product page for my book and click through to the sample is precious to me. If you’ve gotten to the end of Chapter 2, which has set up all of the story and tone promises, chances are you enjoyed my writing enough to read through to the end.

It might not be the creative choice I prefer, but adding the more obvious hook in here was probably the safer, more commercial decision.

Maybe someday, when I’ve built enough trust with readers, I can take some more risks creatively. But for now, I’m focusing on doing whatever I can to prevent the dreaded ‘DNF’.

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, the next Cradle—something that will be even better and more beloved than the works that have been immortalized in the literary canon.

And then you write your first word, and with that word, you’ve eliminated a billion possibilities. By the time you’ve written your first sentence, you realize that you’re a no-talent delusional hack who will never be able to craft anything a tenth as good as the latest trashy read you picked up from the bargain bin at a remainder store and you question your sanity for daring to have the audacity to think you might be worthy of trying.

Openings are hard to write. And they’re hard to get right. This is what my first draft looked like:

It follows roughly the same beats as the published version:

• Rahelu agonizes over her Petition, trying to put the best spin on her answers without outright lying.
• Her father reminds her to eat before he leaves for the sea.
• She spills ink on her Petition.
• Her mother scolds her for wasting food, for lacking manners, for being slow.
• It ends the same way: her mother tells her to wash and hurry so they can arrive before Hzin.

I didn’t have much of my worldbuilding done before I started, so even though it was a short (for me) scene of 1,035 words, there were a lot of XXX placeholders. I started a list:

As an opening, it’s awful and boring:

• There is no sense of who Rahelu is as a character.
• There’s conflict between Rahelu and her mother but nothing happens!
• There’s simultaneously too much exposition and not enough exposition.
• Some magic is happening but it’s not very exciting.
• The stakes are unclear and therefore uncompelling.

So I expanded the scene and tried to make it do more work. It ended up being 4,605 words long. (Here’s the tracked changes from the alpha read first draft to the beta read version.)

I made an effort to give Rahelu’s narration more individuality. (By then, I’d finished the first draft so that was easier do to.) I shoehorned in more exposition about the Houses, Rahelu’s interactions with the other trainees, her family’s immigrant journey, her prospects.

All that was fine. But what really saved the opening was the new sequence with House Isonn’s debt collectors. Without it, no matter how much Rahelu worries about money, the stakes feel abstract. But when money problems manifest directly on their doorstep with the threat of physical violence, the stakes become real and visceral.

That’s where the book starts to gain momentum. And it takes far too long to happen: not only did my beta readers have to slog through an almost 6,000-word-long prologue, they had to make it through more than 3,000 words of Rahelu reviewing her fantasy job application before House Isonn arrives on the scene.

Normal readers would have DNF’d somewhere around the first paragraph, I’m pretty sure. I needed to get them to the action as quickly as possible, to keep them hooked. For a while, I seriously considered moving all of Rahelu’s agonizing over her Petition to Chapter 2, so we could begin with the debt collection sequence. I even considered moving the whole scene to the Lowdocks proper.

I didn’t feel like that solution worked though. Something gets lost and the emotional impact is weakened, when you see that sequence play out without having seen Rahelu’s home environment, the contrast between the immigrant dream and the immigrant reality. It’s a little heavy-handed in the execution—I wish I had the skill as a writer to be more subtle about it—but showing that disjunction was important to me.

The only option left was to cut down the front-loaded exposition as much as possible. It made the apparent scope of the world much smaller, but that was a trade-off I was willing to make. (The post-beta-read version was 3,264 words long. Here’s the tracked changes version to the beta read version.)

That was still too long for my liking. During line edits and proofreading, I cut another 600 words. (Here’s the tracked changes for that.)

The final word count for this chapter stands at around 2,700 words long. It is one of the shortest chapters in the book, apart from the prologue, interlude and epilogue.

Normally, I prefer much longer chapters. Around 5,000–6,000 words is where my chapters typically sit in a first draft, with the longest ones topping out at 10,000–12,000 words. Part of this is because I’m naturally verbose; the other reason is that I conceive of chapters as short stories with a self-contained arc. For me, the difference between a scene and a chapter is that while every scene should advance plot and character and develop the world, a scene does not necessarily contain an arc.

You’ll have noticed that Chapter 1, as published, does not have an arc. This was because Chapter 1 did not originally end here. It ended at the same end point of the published Chapter 2. The last scene of the published Chapter 13 was the middle of the arc, and it originally took place in the middle of the events that now comprise Chapter 2.

It was confusing for my alpha and beta readers and set up the wrong kinds of story and character promises. I moved the middle scene closer to the midpoint of the book, which we’ll discuss when we get to the Chapter 13 annotations.

That helped, but it still left me with pacing issues. Alpha and beta readers all agreed that the book takes a while to get going. I debated my chapter breaks for weeks, but ultimately caved and broke the story into shorter chapters to help with pacing.

I think it was the right thing to do.

I’m still not sure how I feel about short chapters. Hopefully, as I improve as a writer, I’ll develop more economy with my prose and get better at constructing multi-layered scenes, so I can pack more story into the same word count.

(I realized yesterday that The Traitor Baru Cormorant is only about 140,000 words long. It blew my mind. I’ve got a long way to go as a writer.)

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.

So, no prologues. No matter how much I liked them personally.

Unfortunately, I had two problems:

• The first half of the book lacked sufficiently large stakes for epic fantasy. There is House intrigue happening, but Rahelu isn’t privy to it, so it isn’t apparent from her POVs—which form 99% of the book. Doh.
• The murder mystery doesn’t kick in until more than halfway through the book, so it feels like a left turn out of nowhere.

I tried really hard to solve this without adding a non-Rahelu POV. But every solution I considered (Rahelu running into the murder/s or murderer, somehow; Rahelu hearing rumors about the murder/s; etc) felt horribly hamfisted and contrived.

In the end, I gave up and went with the obvious solution: I added a different POV and made it a prologue.

It’s a tried-and-true technique for fantasy authors because it works. Opening with Azosh-ek’s POV as a prologue lets me establish some story promises that I couldn’t set up with a Rahelu POV in Chapter 1:

• Violence and gore level (I’m not writing grimdark, but there are going to be some gruesome scenes)
• Move the emphasis on the murder mystery away from the whodunit aspect towards the why
• That there will be multiple POVs. Not necessarily a whole heap of them, but it will not be a strictly single POV book.

I’m a huge fan of how Brandon Sanderson uses interludes in his works—they’re a nice little diversion between arcs in his books and offer a glimpse into other parts of his world that the main narrative doesn’t have the opportunity to visit yet.

It’s my hope that the Azosh-ek POVs (the prologue, the interlude, and the epilogue) offer you some variety from the Rahelu POVs, without diluting the focus of the story.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

(Full disclosure: the Azosh-ek prologue was not the original prologue, though, which was a young Rahelu POV, set five years before the events of Chapter 1. If you’re interested in reading that, you can get access by signing up for my mailing list.)

Fantasy maps occupy a weird space for me as a reader. I don’t tend to do more than look at them briefly before I start reading, and I rarely go back to study them in detail afterwards, yet if an epic fantasy novel doesn’t have any maps, it somehow detracts from the reading experience for me.

Pretty silly.

It’s as if the presence of a map sends some sort of message about the author’s care factor in worldbuilding.

Totally unfair, since there are plenty of fantasy authors out there who have put in a great deal of effort into their worldbuilding but don’t have maps. Will Wight, famously, has a map for his own reference purposes and steadfastly refuses to put out any maps after his experience with doing one for The Traveler’s Gate trilogy.

I debated long and hard about whether I would put in a map. As a self-published author, I personally finance every dollar that goes into the publication of my books. Commissioning a map from a real cartographer was far out of my budget.

But I felt like I needed one, to make the right kind of tone promises for the series. My alpha readers had given me the feedback that my book didn’t feel like it had enough literary stakes for epic fantasy. Part of that came down to my choice of POV: since it was my debut novel, I didn’t want to fall into the common fantasy author trap of just throwing in random POVs for the sake of it. And in some ways, throwing in another POV felt like a cheat—like I couldn’t be bothered thinking up a better way to tell the story with the existing POVs I had.

As a result, Petition is a tight POV book. There are only two POVs—Rahelu’s and Azosh-ek’s (and his POV didn’t even exist in the first draft). Neither of those characters are in position to know much about the bigger picture politicking happening in the background…but that’s where the “epic” part of the story is.

Also, during the drafting process, my discover writing brain decided to make a map plot-critical. (More about that later.) That pretty much made my decision for me.

Since I couldn’t afford to hire a professional, I had no choice but to draw the maps myself.

Continent map

Of the two maps that I have, the continent map was the easier one to draw.

While Brandon Sanderson is my role model in many respects, I can’t really bring myself to detail my worlds to the level of detail that he does before writing. To be fair, this is important when you’re constructing a world like Roshar, where the natural phenomena cause the ecology and therefore everything else to be wildly different.

That wasn’t the case for me. By and large, my magic system doesn’t really have a big interaction effect with the environment. And since I’m not the best at geography, I used Azgaar’s Fantasy Map generator as a starting point. My process was not very sophisticated: it involved mashing F5 until I got something that I liked the look of.

From there, I traced over the coastline, the rivers, the lakes and made a note of the various biomes on the map. Once that was done, I followed some YouTube tutorials from the WASD and Caeora channels on how to add the rest of the details. My glaciers are not very convincing—they just kind of look like plateaus—but it was the best that I could do.

City map

This was the more difficult map to draw. Unlike the continent map, where it didn’t really matter where I drew the details, I had to get the city map details right, because they were plot-critical:

In theory, you should be able to figure out the plot twist from looking at the map. In theory. I’m not really sure how successful I was at foreshadowing it—you’ll have to let me know.

Here, too, I used a procedurally generated map to get started. This also involved mashing F5 on watabou’s fantasy city map generator until I got something I was happy with. (By the way, the Azgaar world map generator is integrated with watabou’s city map generator by default, which I think is pretty neat. But it doesn’t always come up with a suitable city layout, so I ended up generating a separate map in watabou instead.)

Tracing over this map took longer. I had to deviate from the base map a lot to work in key landmarks that couldn’t be procedurally generated but which existed in the narrative.

Maps and the writing process

Like I said, as a reader, I normally don’t pay too much attention to maps.

But as a writer, I need ’em. Can’t write without them. I get lost trying to figure out where something is in relation to something else. Sometimes, even trying to keep in mind how a room is laid out, where all the objects are located and how every character in the room is positioned relative to everybody else feels overwhelming.

The published maps were the very last thing I created, when I was taking a break between line edits and proofreading. For the most part, the base procedurally generated maps were sufficient for me to keep continuity straight…and of the two maps that I had, it was the city map that I referred to constantly. (And I will post that version, once we get to the chapter with the plot twist!)

Since I can’t afford to hire a full-time continuity editor like Brandon Sanderson, I needed to keep things as straight as possible during the drafting process so having those reference maps handy was vital. Sorting out timeline continuity issues was bad enough without having to add geographical continuity issues into the mix.

Most of the detailed descriptions of the city and various directions didn’t make it past the line edit stage. While I needed understand the exact route Rahelu took through the streets so I could make sure that it made sense, you didn’t need that detail since, as one beta reader pointed out, it slowed down the action.

I wish there was some way to shortcut this part of my process. Sadly, I don’t think there is, since I find it difficult to write something when I can’t visualize it. Turns out I’m the opposite kind of writer to how I am as a reader—when I read, I don’t spend much time visualizing the characters or the world. At least, not consciously.

Brains are weird.

I am a huge Brandon Sanderson fan. Not just as a reader, but as an author, too. His annotations and his unrivaled transparency taught me a lot about the craft of writing, and his YouTube lectures demystified the intimidating process of taking an idea for a story through to a published work.

There is nothing that I can do to thank Brandon Sanderson for his generosity, apart from one-click buying every single one of his books. (I don’t think that counts, because I’ve been doing that long before I published.)

What I can do, though, is pay it forward. This is the story of my journey to publishing my first novel. All the ‘behind-the-scenes’ stuff about my creative process: the highlights, the lowlights, and weird things. Anything that I think might be of interest to you, whether you’re approaching these annotations as a reader or as an author, including tracked changes through all the versions between rough draft and published text.

Consistent with Sanderson’s annotations, I’ve written these to be read as a companion text alongside the book. And if it’s your first time through, any spoilers for future chapters are clearly marked and hidden.

The story behind the story

Some authors begin by writing a story they’ve always wanted to tell. A story that’s occupied their brain space for years and years, that demands their attention until they have to sit down, put their hands to the keyboard or pen to paper until they’ve gotten the story out of their head and onto the page.

That wasn’t me.

I’ve always enjoyed stories and writing, but I never had a clue about what to write. Everything piece of fiction I ever wrote felt derivative—and it wasn’t even interesting-derivative.

I stopped writing fiction, started climbing the corporate career ladder, and wrote just about everything else. Critical essays. Speeches. Process manuals. Business reports. Proposals. Technical documentation. Textbooks. Case studies. Emails upon emails upon emails.

In my spare time, I devoured all of Brandon Sanderson’s annotations whilst binge-watching his BYU lectures on writing science fiction and fantasy.

I tried writing a Broadway musical with a friend; we got as far as the middle of the second act.

I got married.

We had a baby.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Like many other organizations, my employer was caught out. We had no systems, no processes, no contingency plans in place. I spent the better part of a year working myself to death to make sure business could run as usual. It burned me out in a spectacular manner—complete with meetings with HR and “I quit!” emails.

I was fortunate to be in a place where I could take some time to recover my mental health. Part of that involved doing something purely for myself. NaNoWriMo2020 was coming around, so I decided to try writing fiction again and serialize the project via an online writing community.

(That novel was not this novel. It was a fix fic of a fantasy series where I loved the premise, but detested the author’s execution—I wasn’t brave enough to jump straight in by writing original fiction.)

To my surprise, complete strangers on the internet told me that it did not suck, and that they would genuinely miss reading my chapters when the project wrapped up.

It was a good feeling. And far more rewarding than my corporate job had ever been. It led me to join a writing group to get some critiques on my fix fic.

I learned a lot from their feedback. I learned that:

• Whenever I have a new location, I go overboard with description that drags down pacing.
• I have a penchant for using long, paragraph-length sentences with as many clauses as I can stuff into them.
• I need to work harder on making sure conflict is present in every scene.
• Getting tone, character, and plot promises consistent from the beginning is a real struggle for me.

But the best thing I learned was to have a little more confidence in my writing:

Your villains are good…the petty evil and the unrepentant evil bring me great joy to read about.

Ivy C. Kendall

I really want to see your original stuff. I’ve got a feeling it will be at least 10x better.

Caitlin L. Strauss. Author of The Night City and its sequel, The Night People.

I’m just super excited to see [an] original IP with the amount of thought you’ve put into someones else’s work.

J.P. Weaver, Royal Road author.

From concept to completed draft

For NaNoWriMo2021, I decided I would finally take the plunge. Will Wight’s success proved there was an insatiable demand for more stories like his cultivation/progression fantasy crossover series, Cradle, and very few things in the market hitting the mark.

I set out to write a 75,000 word progression fantasy novel.

(Spoilers: I failed.)

I spent two weeks or so doing a deep analysis of what made Cradle so successful, building my magic system, brainstorming characters, and attempting an outline.

The night before NaNoWriMo2021 began, I realized I had no idea how to write a progression fantasy. My brain just wasn’t drawn to writing that kind of story. I kept the worldbuilding, but threw out the outline, and on 1 November 2021, I opened up a blank document and started writing.

I was determined not to repeat my NaNoWriMo2020 mistakes: editing as I write, and getting lost in research rabbit holes. ‘XXX’ placeholders proliferated everywhere. If I didn’t have a name for a character or location, or couldn’t think of the right word to describe something, or even complete sentences, I simply shoved a placeholder into the document and moved on.

I tried very hard to not revise as I went: my manuscript was full of comments on all the bits of writing that I thought was terrible.

There were lots of comments. Thousands of them.

But the process worked. I crossed 25,000 words in the first week, and 50,000 on day 16. Sometime during the third week, I had the sinking realization I would need at least 100,000 words to finish the story properly—and that the only way I could get unstuck from plotting hell was to split the book into a trilogy.

On the morning of Christmas Eve in 2021, I finished the rough draft of Petition. It clocked in at 109,188 words long.

(Just a tad longer than the 75,000-word novel I had planned.)

I spent January 2022 doing a worldbuilding pass to slay every ‘XXX’ in the manuscript, followed by a continuity pass, and a few revisions for alpha reader revisions.

The book went out to beta readers in February 2022. (It was 122,485 words long.) I took a short break to work on my blurb and finalize the cover design instead, while obsessing over the possibility that they would hate my book the whole time.

They didn’t hate it.

But they confirmed what my alpha readers had been telling me—that the two halves of the book read like they were two, totally different stories—and highlighted a few other major issues. (Since this post is getting rather long, I’ll get into the details in later annotations.)

I started structural revisions for beta reader feedback in March 2022. I didn’t finish until the end of April 2022. Some of these were major changes, so I sent it off for another beta read while I did line edits in May 2022. Those took about two weeks.

Proofing took another two weeks.

And on 31 May 2022, exactly 212 days (or seven months) after I started writing Petition, I logged into KDP and pressed the ‘Publish’ button.

It is not a perfect book. But it is, in the words of Will Wight, the ‘best six-month book’ that I know how to write.

I hope you enjoy reading it.

Index of annotations

1. Introduction (this post)
2. Maps
3. Prologue
4. Chapter 1
5. Chapter 2
6. Chapter 3
7. Chapter 4
8. Chapter 5
9. Chapter 6
10. Chapter 7
11. Chapter 8
12. Chapter 9
13. Chapter 10
14. Chapter 11
15. Chapter 12
16. Chapter 13
17. Chapter 14
18. Interlude
19. Chapter 15
20. Chapter 16
21. Chapter 17
22. Chapter 18
23. Chapter 19
24. Chapter 20
25. Chapter 21
26. Chapter 22
27. Chapter 23
28. Chapter 24
29. Chapter 25
30. Chapter 26
31. Chapter 27
32. Epilogue