A small hole

I thought I had most of Kirya planned in my head when I started writing it, not uncommon when I'm writing longer stuff. At the end of chapter 18, however, I realized that I, like Shemhazai, was without direction, and that I was dangerously close to losing that link to Kirya herself that I'd fought through 17 chapters to build. She's a very difficult character for me to hold on to. I realized that where I'd thought I had a small hole in my planning, easy to fill, I had a gap the size of Australia. But despair not. It took a while to work up the courage, and then I dedicated every moment my brain wasn't occupied for two days to stitch something together. That's how it feels, like picking up pieces, maybe like pieces of a map that someone's cut up to fit in envelopes then sent to me in the wrong order. I have to stitch them together, and then I look at the map and go wow, this is awesome. So then, making an uncut, unstitched copy of the map, I wrote chapter 19, which funnily enough you won't get to see until I've written 20 and 21. The side effect is that this story is getting longer and longer, but also that I finally feel I've pinned Kirya down to who she really is. So have faith that there is a plan, and it is coming along nicely, and, wow, it is awesome.

Somewhat out of synch then, I post ch16-18. I didn't post them before because before my fantastic stitching, I was convinced they were crap. That's usually my sign that I need to think about where to go next. And, well... I hope this plot still intrigues you. Let me know what you think of the new twists and turns... if they are twists and turns.