So I managed to get another chapter up last night, which makes two in a week. I’m hoping to continue to be able to continue with one chapter a week; it feels good. That is, above and beyond feeling good to be able to write fiction again, and feeling good because I’m moving the story forward, it feels like a good rate. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ll have a post up soon with commentary on the writing of the chapter. I like the idea of putting up notes about the process; as a reader I always love things like that from other authors, so why not? That’ll go up Sunday, I think. But there’s something I want to highlight here about the chapter I just posted, an edit I’m making to earlier chapters.

I described the forest chambers, the complex of five rooms with the Chamber of Oak and Holly more-or-less at its heart, in a slightly different way. I’ve given each of the rooms more of an identity. I don’t think anything I’ve added contradicts anything I’ve written before, but I wanted to be able to make a distinction between the different rooms.

That said, there is a contradiction in this chapter of something that went before. Diccon mentions two graves in the last chamber of the forest rooms, a room occupied by a single vast willow. That’s a contradiction in that I’ve moved Domini’s place of burial out of the Oak and Holly room, and in that I’ve added someone else to the burial ground.

The ‘someone else’ is the sister of Gryselde’s old order who had come in with Entemena’s elves, and who was apparently killed by the old head of the order. The more I thought things through, the more I felt that Gryselde was likely to bury her rather than burn her with the dead outlaws. So I’ve taken the liberty of adding her here, and will be making the change in earlier chapters as well.

As for why I moved the graves: I thought a bit more about the space in the Chamber of Oak and Holly, and I thought this made more sense. Firstly I’m not sure that the Ossianic ceremonies would be done so close to the dead. Secondly, and more practically, having a lot of trees around means a lot of tree roots — which makes digging difficult, and limits space for further bodies. So, I’ve had the graves go into a room with only the one (really big) tree. For a variety of other reasons I prefer this image, but there is a certain base necessity here, I feel.

So, apologies to anyone thrown by the change, but I really feel it makes more sense, and a better story.