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I can't really call this another Dark Place Progress Post since I've been working on my book again, Between Music And Silence. (I still wish I could think of a better name.)

I've dived into making major revisions to the story structure and character arcs, and I made a couple tweets & bluesky posts about my experience so far. First of all, working on this book is so fulfilling that I've felt physically livened up over the past week. And that's happened about every time I came back to this book. It is like the exact opposite experience from working on Welcome To The Dark Place in a lot of ways. Game development has sustained me, but this book has rejuvenated me. It's the first book I've written (although I tried to write another a while back), so there's always something to learn and improve.

Investigating the best parts of this story--how did they happen?

The other post I made on Bluesky was about how I do plot better than characters. And I hate world-building more than either of them.

Writing good characters and dialogue makes me feel like I'm trying to start a fire with sticks. I get sparks, but there have been a seldom few times where I caught a flame--those are my most prized possessions, and I have no idea how they happened. I do have some observations, though.

There are two particular moments where I think my story was writing itself. The first was when my main character was confronted with an evil of the world that had been hidden from him, and he demanded answers which I had to figure out. This was a moment where my story could have died, because I had no idea what came next. But I ended up writing the genesis of my fantasy world, and this lore drop propelled the rest of the story into places I had never conceived. Reading it now, I can still feel how the story has hit a growth spurt.

The next moment where my story felt like it was "writing itself" was when my side character (Thrin) was weighed down by some kind of guilt and fear, and she needed to spill the beans. I wrote it all in her voice; in the original version of the story, she told her entire backstory in dialogue. This monologue felt totally forced, and I hated writing it. Then I had the idea to present her backstory as a flashback chapter. It became two chapters, and the second of those is now the best chapter in the book; I think I was in a flow state while writing this chapter, and I still believe it's my best character writing. It's good all on its own as an isolated story. What!

The main observation I will state is that these shining moments came from back-breaking work that made me cringe out of my mind; the work was answering questions I really didn't care about, because the story demanded it. Both these chapters resulted from exposition-dumping which I turned into story-telling. I think one lesson is that just because something feels forced or isn't fun to write doesn't mean it's not good, honest work.

Why did it feel so hard? And why do I hate, hate, hate world-building? It could even be that forcing myself to answer hard questions about my story makes me cringe because it's a form of emotional vulnerability. Maybe I don't want to face the fact that I don't know my story and characters all that well. I don't want to break my belief in the story any more than I want to break the reader's belief. And maybe I secretly believe the world of my story and characters is paper-thin and won't hold up when I question it (like when a game designer avoids playing their game in a way that will break it.) But every time I've tested it--really brought it to the edge--my story soared.

So now what

I don't want to get into specifics of what I'm changing now, because it's still in brainstorming. I am making major changes to the second half of the plot to fit the characters. The new version of the Prelude chapters is probably done, and it's even more intense than before. I've workshopped it so hard up to this point, I think it's probably good enough. You can see it here and give me feedback on it. The Prelude chapters have always been very unique from the rest of the book, but I think that's okay, since they give little hints that the story is going to change.