Chapter 240: Appendix 9 – Author Commentary on Arc 4

Well, that was a ride, wasn’t it? It reminded me a bit of a rollercoaster.

This arc did a (generally) better job of following the original plan than Braving the Necropolis (recently renamed to Shadows of the Necropolis) did. The one big thing I missed was that I wanted to spend some more time with Katya, but there was never a good point to jump over to her perspective; things were always frantic and jumping around as it was.

The biggest goal was to resolve the original theft storyline that started After the End, and we’ve made it that far. Oh, there are a few loose ends; Macho is still out there, and we don’t know who the buyer is. At the same time, the buyer doesn’t know who Rissa is or that any of this ever happened, and Macho has bigger concerns than Rissa and Serenity. Regardless of those small loose ends, Frank is taken care of, so the major threat is gone.

The secondary goals were to solve Aki’s problem, introduce Tranquil Conviction and his primary opponents (Earth’s deities), and to look into the invasion of New York City. We’ve done all of those as well. We’ve even managed to basically resolve the NYC invasion - or at least get it to where it can happen (mostly) offscreen. Serenity still has a bunch of people to send in for deworming and there will be a lot of activity happening around it, but most of that will happen in the next few days. A little will bleed into the next book, but I’m hoping to close that one for good fairly soon.

The part I’m less happy about is the flow. It seemed like there was a lot of jumping from one thing to another. It all made sense as in “yeah, that’s what would happen next in these circumstances”, but there wasn’t a focus on a single story thread. I’m not sure exactly how I’d fix it if I were to go back and revise things; in many ways, this was a book about dealing with things as they come up, and that makes it hard to stay on one thread for too long.

For the next arc I’m going to try to put the focus on two main story threads and see how that works out. Unfortunately, I do have a third thread that will definitely need some screen time; it’s mostly setup for the following arc, though, so I don’t expect it to take up too much room. And then there’s … okay, there’s still a lot going on.

The working title for the next arc is Finding Convictions. I’m sure you can guess that Tranquil Conviction is to play a role, but that’s not the only thing it’s referring to. There are some decisions that people are going to need to make that may challenge their deepest beliefs, and while some of them will find the decisions easy, others will not.

At least, they won’t if this goes where I think it will. Hopefully we don’t have another Shadows of the Necropolis on our hands when we talk about my planning!

See you in the next arc tomorrow, and as always, Enjoy!

~Lillene