Read it here:Â https://www.wattpad.com/651563855-the-mechanical-crown-towards-apotheosis This chapter marks the end of Arc 5 of the book. It’s a big one, operating on a scale unlike anything we’ve really seen in the story so far. An entire floating city, tilted on an angle, falling through clouds towards the ground? Go on then. There’s […]
Read it here:Â https://www.wattpad.com/648721651-the-mechanical-crown-the-fall Sometimes a chapter expands unexpectedly, this one being a case in point. The original plan was for Tranton to reach the spire and meet with Fenris fairly quickly, thus bringing the arc to a close. Instead, it ended up as a two-parter with this one focusing on […]
So the interesting thing about this chapter is how it reflects on some of the earlier chapters. I would expect readers by now to have at least suspected that Queen Anja was in fact the disguised Kraisa, even if they weren’t 100% sure. This is not so much a twist […]
Continuing the chapter notes catch-up, here’s a big one on ‘Approaching Thunder’: I knew this chapter was coming from the moment I started writing this book, back in 2016. In a lot of ways, everything has been leading towards the end of this chapter, even if readers weren’t aware of […]
Got a bit behind on posting chapter notes. Time to catch up, starting with ‘Tranquility rising’. I am acutely aware of the impending ending of Arc 5. Despite the past few chapters being unusually quiet affairs, they’re building up to something. I’m also deep in planning for Arc 6. I’ve […]
Read it here! The original plan for this chapter was to have Tarn and Tranton walking around Aviar, so that the dialogue and exposition are surrounded by action. I shifted away from that approach towards having them stuck in a fairly static scene in Tarn’s apartment for a couple of […]
Read it here. Yep, the chapter title is a ref to the Babylon 5 episode. Why not? Talking of references, the character name of ‘Obin’ is a minor nod towards The Banner Saga’s ‘Ubin’. No connection story or personality-wise, I just like the name. Here we have Tranton, separated from […]
Read it here! Writing an online serial which gets published weekly, as it is written, is closer to creating a television show, or an on-running comic, than it is to writing a novel. Each chapter commits me further down a particular path, and there’s no going back to revise or […]
Read it here. Hatch Eyer is a scientist at heart. Intrinsically, she wants to understand the world around her, and gets irritated by anything which eludes her. She observes, analyses, concludes. Arriving at Aviar is the greatest moment of her life, and separating her scientific curiosity from the practical and […]
Stories need rules as much as they need imagination; as counter-intuitive as it seems, placing restrictions on what can happen in your fictional world will help readers to understand the dramatic tensions, threats and challenges encountered by your characters. This is true regardless of the genre you’re playing in. (more…)