Afterword - Book 1 - Chapter 47 (Patreon)

Chapter 47: A Hundred Thousand Cuts

(Original Chapter Title: A Hundred Thousand Cuts)

The OG version of this chapter was only 2,669 Words (yes, tee-hee/nice/etc.) the version I uploaded to RR just now was 7943 words.

When I started writing Blind Chaos, I had no idea how to write combat scenes. It's an art form, and not one I had any level of skill with. I've read great combat scenes and I've read poor ones, but just reading never quite gives you the tools to write your own. There was a reason (beyond past Crim hates fun) that my OG draft typically shied away from detailed combat scenes, as I'd mentioned in previous afterwords.

Bit by bit I gained experience as I wrote the first two books. The War Goblins fight was rewritten with that experience.

The OG version is a misnomer, by the way. I'd HATED the original draft of this chapter and rewrote it a day or two later, back when I was writing book 1—and no, I don't have a copy saved of the original original.

But I dreaded this chapter as I neared while editing. [Reflections of Reality] was a Skill that got refined and adjusted (nerfed, if you want a more blunt explanation) the further I wrote Ranthia's adventures. By book 2, it was far slower and more limited than I'd initially written it. The constant efforts to write something genuinely interesting, without it being too powerful to erase tension. But this left me in a bit of a fix, even before the last second rewrite my older Patreons are aware of, further restricting the Skill because I learned that I was missing half the formula for its mana cost.

I had no idea how to approach this chapter as my editing process drew me ever nearer. Ranthia's victory was meant to be narrow and improbable when she had far more advantages than she possessed now, and the victory was too important for all of what followed to change to a loss.

So I took the approach I did to the war goblin fight after the final change to [Reflections of Reality] forced me to. I set up my formulas for every speck of arcanite. I had Ranthia's before-and-after levels and temporarily ran two versions of her sheet. I carefully tracked every element.

And I wrote the fight from scratch.

This is a slight misstatement, when I write from scratch I have the original text several linebreaks down. I reuse any solid imagery or events that I want to keep, but I'm deleting it as I progress with the new prose—keeping the passage of time loosely similar. Anything I use again gets removed immediately. Lots of remaining text gets deleted. It's a process that I've used numerous times throughout my editing process, but here and the War Goblin fight were the two big ones.

I'm actually pretty content with how this chapter came out, surprisingly. I think I managed to strike a good balance of a probable victory while highlighting just how narrow—borderline impossible—it was. As a beta reader recently mentioned, it's a good thing that Ranthia is so stubborn.

I hope the chapter is a satisfying read for as many as possible, I don't know if I can say I'm proud of this chapter, but I'm content with it. ...Which is kind of amazing for a chapter I'd dreaded and resented for weeks—I kept referring to it as the 'hell chapter' even!—until I rewrote it.