kerapace asked:

trying to not spoil Almost Nowhere in the ask, but if you feel you can answer right now, when in the creative process did you come up with the events described in the most recent chapter?

It’s kind of hard to answer this without providing context about when I came up with a bunch of other things.

According to git, I wrote a rough outline of those events in my notes on 4/4/21, shortly after the publication of Chapter 18.

In one sense, that date is too early, since there are some big differences between that rough outline and what I ended up writing.

In another sense, the date is too late, since I clearly had some form of the events in my head before I wrote them down in notes.   (They’re foreshadowed, vaguely, in parts of the book I wrote in 2019.)

And anyway, what does the date even mean?  When is April 2021 situated in the creative process?  Early, late?  Even I can’t really answer that.

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It may help to know that I usually come up with my plots by, essentially, thinking like a fan theorist about my own partially finished work.

This is part of why I always publish stuff serially.

I like to start out with only a very vague plan, write a bit of stuff, and post it publicly, with a self-imposed rule that I don’t edit the basic who-did-what-to-whom content after the fact.  (Though I can fix typos and clean up style and stuff like that.)

Then I go back and read it, and I “speculate” about what is “going to happen” in the rest of the book.  Like a fan, I try to come up with clever explanations for outstanding mysteries that will make everything seem like brilliant foreshadowing in retrospect.

When things go well, I’m able to “figure out” a good answer to any given question long before I need to spell out that answer for the reader.  As we get further along in a story, more of the foreshadowing is deliberate on my part, and the writing is drawing upon successively more precise versions of the underlying plan. 

This is a very creatively fruitful method for me personally.  (I only happened on it by accident, after starting to post stuff serially.)  But it makes it difficult to say when I knew about any given thing, relative to the rest of the story.

Things snap into focus in an out-of-order way, sometimes much later than you’d guess from the way they’re built into the story, and then sometimes not.  And eventually even I can’t remember what order things arrived in.