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July 20, 2009
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It has been a looong time since I put up my last chapter. I actually wrote the first draft of this chapter
on January 22, 2008. (After Chapter 212 was posted.) I didn't work on it again for six months. I revised
and added to the chapter three times in September, and got what was essentially the finished chapter done on
August 1, 2008.
Then why has it been almost a year since I finished it? Well, life was getting in the way. I was having
more distractions, and other matters I needed to take care of. And I didn't want to just put up one chapter
then have another extended break. If I put up a new chapter, I wanted to know it was going to be because the
chapters were going to be coming out on a regular basis again until the Volume's end.
I was writing this chapter, and chapter 217 at the same time, and then also started on chapter 218 in
September. But besides my distractions, I hit a wall with chapter 219. I didn't know how to get it done
right, and wasn't quite sure how I wanted the final chapter to end. With those two problems in the way, I
didn't want to put up this chapter quite yet.
Those chapters 219 and 221 are still giving me some trouble, but I'm almost there. And 216-18, and 220 are
all almost done or are actually finished. With this kind of lead, I'm confident I can finish them all and
finally complete Volume 2. I've also begun working on the outline for Volume 3, which I hope to complete on
a regular basis.
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I started working on this chapter sooner than I usually do, because I figured this was going to be a hard
chapter to write. In Volume 1, I wrote Stark to have a blind loyalty to Lord Luna. It was a short volume,
and there's only so much you can fit in to it. And Lord Luna was the antagonist. But that blind loyalty just
can't last forever. There has to be something going on in his mind. He's going to have some questions.
And Lord Luna's motivations have be revealed. So I needed to reveal Lord Luna's plans. And it needed to be
done right. I think it turned out pretty well.
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Sometimes chapters have a very solid concept and just flow out during the first draft. Sometimes a chapter
has multiple points I want to make, but still seem to easily just flow out as I write, and connect to each
other very organically. This wasn't one of those chapters. This was a chapter that needed to have Stark's
concerns about his failure put to rest, a discussion as to why West Luna uses guards differently, what Lord
Luna thinks of Melfina in general and how he reacts to her necromancy, what Lord Luna's plan is, and how Stark
reacts to all this information.
I first just wrote random bits of conversation as it came to me, and it took several revisions to make them
all fit together. How do I know this when it's been a year since I started? Besides keeping track of the
final revisions, I've been keeping copies of all my rough drafts for even longer. On top of that I also
write journal entries that are only just for me, so I can remember when I came up with certain ideas, and how
things have been going. I do those for myself, and so I can put in something interesting for these
commentaries. They're filled with tons of spoilers, for all the way up to the end of Volume 8, so I can't post
them up just yet.
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Something I knew I wanted to do from the beginning, was the put in the Eight Breaths meditation technique.
It's something we would do when I used to train for Hapkido, so I wanted to put it in there, to give Stark's
world more detail. It wasn't actually called the Eight Breaths. Too bad I don't remember what it was
actually called. This section probably got the some of the best benefit from the long break. I had a very
hard time describing what was going on, in an interesting way.
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Word Count: 1,463
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