Afterword - Book 5 - Chapter 15 (Patreon)

Chapter 15: Interlude – Lumornor – An Unexpectedly Wild Lecture

And we now know where Clover went!

I wasn't quite sure how to do this chapter when I first got her. My initial plan was to have a multi-perspective chapter of Ranthia gathering her friends and their desperate search, interspersed with Lumornor's PoV for the chapter I wrote.

My beta readers talked me out of that, and I'm glad they did. I think it would have been needlessly distracting, even if it meant that I couldn't quite clear up a few murky points in the prose.

What actually happened was that Litil delivered Clover home after they finished for the day. ...Not knowing that Ranthia was home. With Sunny. Clover got mad and left, ending up in Lumornor's lecture by sheer happenstance.

And to make something I did suggest in the chapter more explicit: she liked what she saw during the lecture.

Lumornor is fun to write when I can get into the right headspace, because he is openly and totally prideful and self-centered. The sheer arrogance and self-certainty is fun to write and it makes him so judgmental too! The man is completely the opposite of my own skittish mentality.

...Wait, does that mean Clover's my self-insert?

I kid, I kid; I don't do self-inserts. There's a piece of me in every character I write, but just as importantly, most of them leave pieces in me. I don't really like using people I know as characters and it'd be a lie to say that any character I've ever written was directly inspired by anyone that I've ever met. Sure, the characters are colored through my own limited experiences, but they're their own characters.

Anyhow, I hope the rest of you enjoyed Lumornor's whole "don't think about the rabbit" while remaining heavily distracted by the rabbit thing. That still brings me joy, even if I had to rush when I was proofreading this one, thanks to running out of time today.

There's a reason this afterword's a touch late. Sorry!