When it comes to the inclusion of explicit sex scenes in fantasy novels (particularly those not targeted towards romance readers), the decision tends to be divisive. Readers typically fall into two camps: those who find the sexual content gratuitous and/or unnecessary, and those who disagree. I’ll admit that I used to be in the former […]

Of all the chapters in Petition, this is probably the one that I learned the most from even though it is one of the chapters that changed the least. Because I write very similarly to how Naomi Novik writes—by starting with a character’s voice and inhabiting that character’s viewpoint—I generally have a very strong sense […]

When I started out writing Petition, I chose to write it in third person limited perspective. There were many reasons for that decision: After deciding to write in a close third, the next choice was tense: past or present? In my experience, past tense is more common but present tense lends a feeling of immediacy […]

Many things have caught me unaware during the process of writing Petition but one wins the prize for the biggest surprise by a very large margin: the romantic subplot. That’s because I absolutely detest romance as a genre. (Sorry romance fans; it’s just not for me.) I could—and have—gone on long rants about why: I […]

Chapter 18 is the kick-off for the murder investigations which make up the second half of Petition. Whenever I look back at this chapter and the outline I had for it now, it’s always very funny to me. Not only am I someone who isn’t very into crime fiction, I’m also terrible with outlines. But […]

Chapter 17 is the shortest chapter in Petition. (Technically, the prologue, interlude, and epilogue are significantly shorter but they don’t really count.) The basic plot trope/beat—a makeover sequence—is pretty straightforward. And, as with most things that ended up in Petition, I didn’t set out to write it consciously. I kind of hate the makeover trope […]

Epic fantasy has been my genre of choice ever since I stumbled across it at my local library. I can’t even remember which book or series it was exactly—perhaps The Belgariad by Eddings or Magician by Raymond E. Feist or it could’ve been Dragonlance by Weis and Hickman or maybe Pern by Anne McCaffrey. (Really, […]

I ought to have said back in the annotations for Chapter 13 that everything from Chapters 14 through to the end of Chapter 25 did not exist in the original outline, which called for the following: Act I: Rahelu Petitions the Houses; becomes a Supplicant; is sent on assignment. Act II: Rahelu completes the assignment. […]

When I wrote the published prologue, I did so very intentionally, knowing that I wanted it to form a little independent arc with the interlude and the epilogue. Yet I wanted to keep them as short as possible, so they wouldn’t “overstay their welcome” (as one of my beta readers put it) or steal focus […]

I feel like a broken record saying this, over and over again, but in writing these annotations, it becomes really apparent just how mysterious my writing process is to myself: when I got to this point in the story, I had no idea how I was going to get Rahelu back into Petitioning after I’d […]

This chapter opens on a scene you probably expected: an announcement covering how everybody is doing in the tournament plotline; the fantasy novel version of the elimination episode on a reality TV show. The main question we need to answer: does Rahelu get in and become a Petitioner or does she fail? In the previous […]

We’ve all heard the saying, ‘show, don’t tell’. It’s a piece of writing advice that’s been thrown around so much that it’s become a common catchphrase. No article or video about writing advice is complete without including “show, don’t tell”. Go to any book, filter for 1-star reviews, and there’s a high likelihood at least […]

One of the decisions I’d made from the very beginning was that Petition was going to be single POV. I didn’t want to fall into the typical epic fantasy author trap of POV bloat that would land me in revision hell; I wanted to write a clean draft of a tightly-focused narrative. (By the way, […]

Chapter 10 is interesting to analyze in terms of its construction. On the surface, it seems like a pretty boring scene. It’s just Rahelu, Lhorne, and Dharyas chilling out over lunch in a tavern with the rest of the Ideth applicants. Not much plot happens. That’s deliberate. In Jim Butcher’s scene-and-sequel terms (though I don’t […]

Chapter 9 is the third-longest chapter in the entire book at around 6,700 words. (The longest chapter, if you’re curious, is Chapter 22 which has the action climax of the book. The second-longest is Chapter 21 which is the emotional build-up.) I remember being incredibly nervous while writing the first draft because this is the […]

The main problem I had created for myself with the first challenge is that while scavenger hunts can be fun to do, they are not fun to read. I’d also set myself up to have twenty tokens in play—thank goodness I came to my senses during revisions and whittled them down to ten. I had […]

I honestly didn’t put a lot of thought into deciding what the challenges were: I simply wanted something that was action-heavy, that would showcase the magic system, and that would require teamwork. “Scavenger hunt” fit, so I went with it. By now, we’ve seen most of the magic system at play in basic ways already: […]

A lot of this book was written by accident and this chapter is the perfect example of discovery writing in action. It has two scenes: an opening scene where Rahelu’s mother is helping her prepare for the challenges and a closing scene at the Guild when the challenges begin. Rahelu and her mother In the […]

One of the most unintuitive things I have discovered about myself as a writer is that I am, apparently, incapable of sticking to an outline. I just can’t do it, despite my tendency to being structured and methodical in my approach to most things in life. I’ll make comprehensive lists of things that should happen […]

In contrast to the previous chapter, this next chapter was one of the easiest chapters to write. Very little changed from the original draft to the published version. When I say very little changed, I don’t mean that in terms of actual count of words added, deleted, and moved around. I’m more referring to the […]

If there was one chapter that summed up my experience of writing Petition, it was this chapter, which has the dubious honor of being the most revised chapter in the entire book. For the most part, I write very clean first drafts. That doesn’t mean they don’t require editing—they do!—but I generally have a good […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]