It’s funny the things that you pick up here and there. I wrote a story for the historical magazine Old News some time ago about porcelain, and the European who figured out how to make the stuff. It was highly-desired, literally worth its weight in gold due to its beauty and hardness. So having it turn up as a treasure in the dungeon seemed to make sense.

As for Gamelyn’s riddle: the answer will be given in a later chapter. But I have to say that the chapter in question will be coming up a little later than I’d thought. I’d originally planned for things to tie up fairly quickly; but the dice, as they are wont to do, made things more complex and more interesting.

Getting into Gamelyn’s head, messed-up as it was, was important to me. It gave me a chance to pull out the present-tense narration. It felt right when I sat down to work on the chapter, and I decided to go ahead with it. While obviously part of the fun of the story is trying to find the right point-of-view character from which to tell each chapter, another part is trying to expand the variety of structural and technical resources the story uses. I’m hoping it keeps things unpredictable. I’m also hoping that as the range of techniques grows, the scope of the story will grow along with it. We’ll see.

The next chapter goes up on Monday, in which somebody has to figure out what they really want.