Filed Away

More chapters (21, 22, 23 and 24) are up at Methuselah’s Daughter. I’ve been trying to keep a running commentary on the chapters as we go, but somehow it’s just not happening. So sue me.

Lots of what happens in these chapters are the direct result of arguments between Dean and I. Arguments about how Zsallia would react to being pressured to allow herself to be examined. For that matter there is a basic disagreement between us throughout the book regarding the need to reveal the nature (but not the cause) of Zsallia’s immortality, an argument that eventually led to the book ending after Part 4 and leaving the story of Elaine and Jeremiah McAllister untold.

Basically, as the book moves forward and Zsallia and her ghost writer argue about this what you’re really reading is Dean and I arguing about where the book is going. While I believe Part 4 is the best part of the book overall, I think it suffered because we were rapidly diverging on that single issue. At one point we actually stopped working on the book and only spoke minimally for about 6 months until I forced the issue by stitching together the various pieces we had. As a result the portion of the story where Zsallia describes traveling to Arretium seems pretty disjointed… but that’s in a future chapter, and may yet be completely re-written for the 3rd Edition.