Having recently posted this comment to VotV #40, stating that I would not be posting chapters at the rate I could do in the past, I then did the next one in seven days.

How? Simple. This one was a Set Piece. Set Pieces are different from the normal run of story building.

I don't know how others do it (obviously) but when I think up a story there are usually fixed points within it that could be considered pivotal. The rest of the story is really just glue that gets the reader from one pivotal point to the next. Oh, a lot can happen during that 'glue', and it may change the course of the story, but the pivotal points are usually what decides the fate of the characters. Many of those are Set Pieces.

Now these are something my mind does when I'm sleeping, or maybe during some boring non-writing task, when I don't have to actively think about what's going in the next chapter - or even the next paragraph. (The tub and the loo are favourite idle thinking times.) My mind often works these Set Pieces out to a very detailed level. Half the time the story goes somewhere else and they never get used, but when they do, I already know how most of it goes and can knock it out fairly quickly.

There are plenty in SEE: the night disturbance in her bedroom, the fight with Jarwin, the showdown with Yolda, the kidnap attempt in Dekarran, there are many, many more. These arrive almost fully formed and I just have to fit them in the narrative at the appropriate place.

The rest of the tale, not so much. Most of it, many of you will be horrified to learn, I do off the top of my head. I'm sorry, that's just the way my mind works. Why spend time writing something down and getting your thoughts in order when you can write prose and then move it about to suit? Very often that's when the future course of events are thought up, as my characters reach waypoints in their journeys.

In the back of my mind, and nowhere else, is the framework. Things that have to happen along the way to achieve the desired result, although sometimes I have no idea how I'm going to do it when I think them up. Some of those things will end up as Set Pieces but others may pass un-noticed in the text, only to reveal their importance much later on - like Garia's boot knife!

So, to sum up, or as a famous person once said, TL;DR: the output rate of chapters is variable. Some can be produced much quicker than others.

Penny