I hope you guys don't mind, but I would like to take you behind the scenes of Mercy for a moment.

A while back, I felt really stuck on this story. What I wanted to do was get Faith to a point where she had grown enough and learned enough that I could bring back Brand for a final confrontation, but I simply didn't know how to get there from where the story was at the time.

So realizing that conflict drives stories, I asked for help in creating an opponent for Faith.

And Efdumb suggested a spurned suitor, and that helped me get over the hump a bit and I created Donavan, thinking here was someone who could be a legitimate threat to Faith, so she could get stronger by fighting him.

And then, after I published the chapter which introduced Donavan, I panicked.

I felt there was no way I could allow him to actually do what I had created him to do to Faith. The thought of having to write about what would essentially be rape made me ill.

Eventually, I did something I almost never do when I'm writing, I skipped ahead a bit and wrote out how Faith confronts Donavan once free of his influence. Once I had that, I could go back and fill in the details of how the story got to that point.

However, I am now left with the problem I started with, because this confrontation didnt end up taking the time I had planned to spend before Faith was ready to face Brand again.

This has me worried about the quality of the story going forward, and as I suspect many people have gotten frustrated with how long its taking me to write chapters and how short the chapters are turning out to be, giving them more reasons to be frustrated in terms of quality isn't good.

All this anxiety over how the story is being received is new for me. Usually when I write I just am interested in the creative process itself, and only secondarily concerned with popularity. But with Mercy I really wanted to tackle the issues of justice, vengeance, and forgiveness in a way that would be entertaining as well as thought-provoking.

Ah, well ...