Wolf

Brick by brick and stone by stone, we write this out of sinew and bone.

On page 383 of this novel, after writing 110,000 words, I was adding some color and texture to a chapter. It was a new chapter. I was doing the strange work of taking an existing chapter and turning it into three different chapters. This was one of those.

It was a chapter meant to show something surprising and strange, something uncanny and unusual. Well, along the way to that encounter, I threw in what a boardgame designer might call flavor text. Some bit of cultural worldbuilding that doesn’t really matter at all. Like learning about Korean Fan Death (look it up!) or that many Germans treat a single beer like medicine. Every culture has these odd little bent sideways fingers that are funny and interesting to anyone not born within the culture.

So I was doing a bit of that and then as these characters left the encounter that was the centerpiece of the chapter, I had them return to this topic. Well, in returning to it and filling it out a bit, applying a principle presented by this little cultural artefact, I stumbled end over end into a concept that should have been foundational to this novel.

And a smarter writer would have had it there, planned right from the start.

Me? Well, it took me nearly four hundred pages to even land upon this concept.

But it hit me with such clarity that I see how the entire series may hinge on this little detail, this little concept that feels like a throwaway line–it was!

Layers.

This is what I keep talking about and what I keep wanting to do here. But this is one of those things where you may not catch it on first or even second read, or at least not the importance of it, but if you keep returning to this book, you’ll find it there, sitting humbly in plain sight but so easy to amble on past.

I suppose this all sounds a bit cryptic, but, I mean, if I could say it plainly I suppose this novel wouldn’t be as long as it already is.