Some authors are fantastic with endings. Brandon Sanderson is probably one of the most famous examples. Not only is he notorious for the “Sanderlanche” (the part of the book where the pay-offs for all the plot lines invariably collide into one giant climax), because he is such a heavy outliner for his plots, he’s known for speeding up in how fast he writes as he gets closer to the end of the book.

Historically, when Brandon Sanderson is within spitting distance of writing “The End”, he will do a writing marathon and provide live word count updates on his social media. Generally, with every update he posts, his WPH (words per hour) gets higher and higher.

At the time I was writing Petition, Sanderson was writing Defiant, the fourth and final book in his Skyward series. I remember thinking that since so much of Sanderson’s writing techniques work for me, maybe I, too, would speed up when it came to writing the end of the book.

Some stats on how fast I usually draft:

• When I know what I’m doing, I can draft at something like, 900–1,100 WPH.
• When I’m struggling, my WPH tanks to sub-200.
• When I hate everything I’ve written, it goes negative because I keep chucking sentences, paragraphs, and whole scenes into the prose graveyard.

Having written 3 novel-length works at this point, I can say this with confidence: endings are difficult for me. Every single ending was like pulling teeth, to make sure all of the main plot threads resolved satisfactorily while balancing the pacing.

For Petition, writing the ending was difficult because I had already written the emotional climax which happens in Chapter 27, as well as the action climax in Chapter 22, but there were all these unresolved plot threads dangling. Also, since Chapter 23 left you hanging with the open loop about the sloop debt and Rahelu has been a fairly active character thus far, perhaps you expected this chapter to tackle that head on.

It doesn’t really come up though. Chapter 24 is an entire chapter of Rahelu waiting around for things to happen to her—I mean, half the chapter is just reading through her employment offers and contracts!

Was it weird to put those in?

Maybe.

Was it fun for me to write?

Hell, yes. I’ve read so many of these contracts in my life that I could write one in my sleep.

Also employment contracts are really important and you should never, ever sign one without understanding what you’re getting yourself into, because that’ll save you the inevitable heartache of having to get expensive legal advice on what to do when one of those clauses you didn’t read carefully rears its ugly head years down the track.

(Sidebar: Why are the fantasy contracts that get page time always have to be demon summoning contracts? Legal thrillers are a thing. Fantasy legal thrillers would be super cool, I would be into that. Sadly, that’s a concept that will have to go on my “cool book ideas that I am the wrong author for” list.)

Anyway. I think the combination of this chapter not dealing with the obvious plot hook from the previous chapter, combined with Rahelu’s sudden passivity is probably why this chapter will feel the weirdest for most readers. So much of contemporary genre fiction focuses on characters and their agency, to the point where characters who behave passively are criticized as being “bad characters”. It’s a very Western approach to story that I personally find lacking in nuance and depth. Fiction is the lens we use to examine reality, and in reality, possessing “agency” is typically the purview of the privileged and the powerful. Even then, there are some things that cannot simply be overcome with “agency”.

For the most part, I have written Petition using a Western style of narrative with a familiar “go-get-’em!” underdog protagonist. Nobody is like that all the time, though, so viewpoint characters who are generally end up feeling flat.

Anyway, there’s nothing that better encapsulates what it’s like to be an Asian immigrant kid than that bewildered, empty feeling of, “That’s it?”

We spend so much of our lives working towards goals that our parents have set for us, goals that have defined us, deferring everything that might pose a distraction to achieving those goals until when we finally get there—and once we make it, we have no idea what to do next.

We have forgotten why our parents set those goals for us in the first place.

So, with Petitioning concluded and offers in hand, we need to see Rahelu with her family again to bring this full circle. The line that marks the turning point in her conversation with her mother and their relationship—“This Lhorne is not Keshwar and you are not Tsenjhe. Why should you try to live your life as if you were?”—is actually based on something my mother said to me, when I was at a very similar point in my life.

I think this moment between Rahelu and her mother is one of my favorite things that I have written.