Inverarity is not a Scottish village

My father passed away this year.



He was not a Harry Potter fan. I'm pretty sure he never read the books or saw the movies. But he did read my fan fiction novels and now and then he would ask me when I was going to finish the next Alexandra Quick book. He wasn't a fan fiction or web reader, so he'd only read them when I could send him a complete ebook. I wish he could have read the end of Alexandra's story.

Alexandra Quick and the Wizard War didn't take as long to write as book five (which my long-time readers know was in writing purgatory for so long that many people, including me, doubted it would ever be finished). It did, however, take longer than I intended. For two years in a row I thought I would be done by the end of the year. Whatever mojo I summoned back to finish book five and start writing again, it's still coming slowly.

I've been writing Alexandra Quick for seventeen years now. There are authors who have built successful careers in far less time than that. I love Alexandra and I love writing, but I feel a bit melancholic at my lack of writing success. Sure, I joke about delivering faster than George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss, but they were successful (and in George's case, very prolific) authors before dropping the ball.

Besides my fan fiction, I have one complete but unpublished SF novel, and two more in the works. Perhaps someday I will finish those. And perhaps one day I will write the Hogwarts Houses Divided sequels that have been in my head for years. Maybe I will write the half-baked AQ sequel series I've been thinking about. Or maybe I will just always think about writing more than I write.

Nonetheless, I do appreciate everyone who has come this far, whether you are an original reader who's been with me since the beginning or who picked up the AQ series along the way. I have fans who started reading my stories when they were in high school, and are now parents, and I've started getting readers who weren't even born yet when I wrote Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle. (Talk about feeling old…)

I read every review and every comment. I follow the /r/AlexandraQuick subreddit and the AQ Discord (which I do not run but where I do participate). I read the theories, the guesses, the excitement, the disappointment, and the criticism. I rarely respond, except in long author posts like this.

So, Alexandra Quick and the Wizard War. Overall, reaction seems to have been positive. Which describes every new book; most people like it, though I always get a few reviews from readers who think the book sucked compared to all the previous ones. Well, can't please everyone.

Here is where I discuss the process, what I was thinking, my observations and comments, and maybe a little insight into what's coming. I am also going to post a link to this post on the /r/AlexandraQuick subreddit and turn it into an AMA thread - you may ask me questions or respond to me either here or on reddit, whichever you prefer.

The Discontent of Readers: I'm Writing For Me, Not You

In the future I am going to avoid mentioning beta-reader feedback, because the rest of you spend so much energy trying to divine what exactly happened and what they thought. There was so much Discourse around Alexandra's "Peak Asshole" moment in book five (a term originally coined by one of my beta-readers and which I jokingly referred to while I was working on the draft) that when it came, most of the regular readers missed it. (I will never not be amused that more readers seemed upset about Alexandra cheating on Brian than about Alexandra doing a bit of ethnic cleansing.)

I don't want to say too much because the beta-readers can speak for themselves. I had four beta-readers this time around; two men and two women. Two liked the final draft and basically thought it was good; two did not.

The problems a couple of them had with the book were partly a matter of tone (especially in earlier drafts, Alexandra was quite a lot more bitchy and mean) but partly a matter of them wanting the story to be something other than what it was. They really wanted to see more light-heartedness and more heartwarming moments of friendship. They felt the tone of the book was too Epic Fantasy and not enough Magical School Friends like the series started. In short, it was not enough like Harry Potter.

I also got a lot of suggestions about different plots or storylines I could add, which I almost always ignore even if I think they are interesting.

None of this is to dismiss the invaluable contributions of my beta-readers, who did make many, many suggestions and perceptive comments and caused me to change quite a few things (like making Alexandra about 60% less bitchy). But there's some classic advice regarding story criticism: if someone tells you they don't like something, that means it didn't work for them. Consider why. But if someone tells you how to fix it or what they would have preferred to see– they're telling you how they would write the story. But they aren't writing the story. You are. (This is not the same thing as spotting plot holes, factual errors, or inconsistencies, which of course are problems that need to be fixed and sometimes my betas do suggest solutions.)

And this is important. Alexandra Quick is my story. I know what I want the story to be.

Some feedback from beta-readers was disheartening, because it's never nice to hear someone say that a story they once loved, they no longer love. But to change it in the way they wanted would require writing a different story. And that applies to some of the feedback regular readers have written. Of course I am sad when someone thinks the story is boring or went in a direction they don't like or failed in some other way. It's all feedback for me to take in as I write the next book. But I'm never going to chase fan satisfaction (and I wouldn't even if I was making money from AQ). I have to trust some people will like what I write and make it worth publishing, but ultimately, I'm writing for me. I know how it all ends, and I wouldn't change it even if I knew I'd lose half my readers. (Obviously I hope this doesn't happen.)

So everyone who has said they wish (I had described the Battle of Roanoke in detail/Alexandra and Larry got more development and build-up/Alex and Larry never happened/Anna had more scenes/I wrote more chapters from other POVs/Anna hadn't died off-screen/the big final battle hadn't happened off-screen/Alex spent more time with her friends/I explained more about what's happening with the ghosts/I delved more into politics/I showed Alexandra training more/I cut this or added that) – okay, I hear you, and in some cases maybe you have a point, but in many cases… no, no you don't. You're telling me what you wanted the story to be. Sorry.

Pacing: It's not a Web Serial

So that said, there were some issues with book six. One of the most frequent criticisms I hear (and I've heard it about a lot of the previous books) is that my pacing is "weird." It's not entirely consistent; I've seen the story called meandering, and I've seen it called too fast-paced and abrupt. There is an idea that novels should be structured a certain way, and this idea is backed up by a lot of literary theory. I am familiar with Freytag's Pyramid and the Three Act Structure and the Fichtean Curve and the Hero's Journey, etc. And I pretty much follow none of them, but tend to outline the sequence of events I want to happen to make plot points happen in the right order. This is probably a weakness of mine I should work on, because complaints about "pacing" are one of the most common and most consistent. And it's not like I don't understand pacing, because I do notice it when I am reading other books.





I somehow can't see it in my own writing, though. The story is all in my head so it's not evident to me when the story feels episodic, disjointed, or moving too fast or too slow. Of course I do get feedback from beta-readers who sometimes recommend a chapter or a character be cut, or ask for more development of some other arc, and sometimes I follow their advice. But if there is a take-away from reader feedback, it's that I really don't pace my novels efficiently or consistently.

I do know that I was guilty of this in Alexandra Quick and the Wizard War, in which I made a deliberate choice to let it get bloated rather than cut some chapters. I have generally tried to write as if I were writing professionally, which means cutting unnecessary scenes and subplots. I had some good suggestions from beta-readers about things I could have cut, and which certainly would have been cut by a professional editor at a publishing house. (In a published version of AQATWW, for example, Hela would probably have disappeared from the book entirely, and so would a couple of road trips.)

I committed the sin of indulging myself in writing with the latitude of a fan fiction novel this time, which is to say, not being ruthless enough in my cuts and leaving characters and arcs that I liked but the story didn't need. I'll try not to do it in the final book, but we'll see how self-disciplined I am.

There was one very specific pacing/structural issue that I knew was a problem when I wrote it, and I tried to think of a way to fix it, and I couldn't. The Battle of Charmbridge really should have been the climax of the book, and the Exodus should have happened before the Battle of Charmbridge. My beta-readers all agreed that this would have been an improvement.

But because of the specific way in which events happened, there was no way to just "move chapters around." (Trust me on this, or just look at the sequence of events and tell me how it would have worked…) I would have had to rewrite a third of the book. My betas all agreed with this, and they also agreed that it probably wasn't worth doing that if I didn't want to spend another half a year rewriting.

It's a lesson learned, though I am not sure if I have learned a solution. (Better outlining?)

So AQATWW kind of ended up with three climaxes: the Battle of Charmbridge, the Exodus, and Hurricane Abraham. One suggestion was to split the book into two (which I could have done if I weren't so determined to make this a seven-book series). Instead, I made it the big uneven beast it is, and while I think the story holds up (and it's good), I recognize that the story architecture is a little uneven.

But I will point out that while I publish the book serially, I write it as a single novel. Your experience reading a chapter at a time, week by week, is not the same as your experience reading the entire book as a complete work, and I look forward to hearing what people think when they experience it that way. (I don't expect pacing issues will go away, but I do expect some chapters that might seem "too fast" or "too slow" or don't seem to fit in isolation will fit better into an uninterrupted narrative.)

Plot Armor and Plot Holes

I normally do not explain things, and certainly not while the story is "ongoing." When you read a book, you don't have the benefit of the author explaining what they were thinking; if it's not on the page, it's not in the story, and if there seems to be a plot hole or something that stretches your suspension of disbelief, the author doesn't get to step in and say "But wait, I have a really good explanation for that!" Sometimes authors will try to fill in these holes in a "fix-it" novel or a chapter in the next book. I'd like to avoid having to do that, although every author sometimes makes mistakes in need of fixing.

That said, here's another fine writing tip I keep closely in mind: "If your story raises questions, you don't necessarily have to tell your readers the answer, but you should have an answer."

Without an answer that at least makes sense in your own head, your story lacks internal consistency.

I try to always follow this principle. There might be an apparent plot hole, there might be unanswered questions, there might be some readers scratching their heads thinking "How did that work, exactly?" I don't feel obligated to spell it all out for you; some of your questions may never be answered. But I do feel obligated to honestly say I have an answer that works, and hopefully one that is at least possible for you to come up with on your own. Just handwaving something away with "Magic" or "It's not important how that happened" is bad writing.

Saw this several times: "Alexandra had too much plot armor."

Hmm, maybe. Every fantasy heroine has some plot armor (I know there was speculation that I might actually kill off Alexandra and have someone else star in the seventh book, but obviously, that was not my plan.) Alexandra recklessly throwing herself into a situation with a half-assed idea of what she'll do, and it somehow working out, is something she'd done throughout the series, but I know she did it a lot in this book. If there were too many times in this book where she should have died if not for author fiat, I hope I at least set up her "escape" well enough that it didn't come out of nowhere. Was she way damn luckier than any troublesome witch has a right to be? Yes, almost certainly. I can't say I agreed with every criticism or that things were "too easy" for her, but I can understand the argument. Alexandra, reckless as she is (and sometimes acting with a near deathwish) is actually pretty smart, and her half-assed ideas aren't completely without merit. But I know I suspended disbelief too much for some.

Some of my betas thought it was too easy for her to repeatedly go to the Lands Below and invade her father's sanctuary (and wreck his plans). Why didn't he leave someone more reliable than Oren to stop her after the first time? Did Abraham make it too easy for Alexandra? Perhaps he trusted her too much? There is a little more going on there, but I could have worked that better.

Escaping from the Castle the way she did from Eerie Island (and many other places) did not, of course, turn out quite the way she hoped (and I had multiple different versions of that written in earlier drafts, with and without Hela and with and without Typhon and Edna). I tried to avoid the World Away becoming a deux ex machina, but obviously it's a pretty big hammer that Alexandra is going to use whenever she sees a nail.

Surrendering herself to the hill dwarves was very deliberate, and I saw this as the culmination of her arc following Anna's death. She was depressed and feeling like nothing she did mattered, and then David, one of her remaining best friends, turned on her (not entirely fairly, and not entirely unfairly). It was of course a reckless decision typical of her, but I thought her psychological state and why she did that was pretty understandable and I was surprised at how many readers apparently didn't think so. (That she had to be rescued by her friends was the entire point; she deliberately put herself in a situation she couldn't save herself from.)

And, okay, yeah, it was also a way to get rid of those Seven-League Boots, which I was regretting giving to her because let's face it, they were OP. As a plot device to explain how Alexandra gets around the country (a much bigger problem than Harry ever had), they served their purpose. But they had to go.

Alexandra's "escape" from the Lands Beyond was of course my version of Harry's return from the dead, and I realize being sent back after a conversation with her deceased friends in a single chapter seems to be getting off easy, but in an already lengthy book, I wasn't going to add an entire side-quest into the Lands Beyond. She wasn't going to meet the Most Deathly Power, though: he was very clear that their next meeting will be their last.

And then there is the escape with Larry. A lot of people complained that it seemed unlikely that the Confederation would put Enemy #2 in a makeshift cell with a single guard who knows her. Oddly enough, none of my betas raised this objection, but I had a problem with it in my first draft, after I had written it and then realized, "Wait a minute, does nobody else in the Confederation know about Alexandra and Larry's televised kiss in Times Square?"

This was an actual potential plot hole and I had to rewrite that chapter a little. For what it's worth, the Confederation was already in a state of chaos. Mage-General Armstrong alluded to this: he wasn't really receiving orders per se. The command structure was in shambles, along with the government. It was the sort of the situation that leads to complete collapse or a civil war turning into a whole bunch of warring states and warlord domains (and it almost did). This was happening in the background (and it's also why Alexandra returns from stopping Hurricane Abraham to learn the war is "over"). In that environment, information doesn't get passed on and people make hasty and improvised decisions with a severe shortage of manpower. If one officer in General Armstrong's staff had been a little more familiar with last year's news, or more on the ball, perhaps Alexandra would not have been so conveniently left in Larry's charge. That said, there seems to have been an assumption that everyone in the ROC would be familiar with all of Alexandra's exploits and what she's capable of, which wasn't true.

So yes, the heroine benefitted from a bit of authorial fiat there and had I rewritten the entire book starting with the Exodus and the Battle of Charmbridge, maybe it would have been a more satisfying solution.

There was a real plot hole at the very end of the book: I wrote the chapter with Alexandra flying out into the Atlantic Ocean, and then one of my betas asked, "What about the Ban?"

Oops.

We went back and forth on possible solutions. Using a crack in the world to just bypass the Ban was the most obvious solution, but here was a place where I really did think that would be a cheap trick. Alexandra simply powering through it/casting a spell to punch a hole in it, likewise. We also talked about how Alexandra's name was recorded in the Census, and whether someone could have tampered with it. (I even considered a rather more elaborate plot involving Alexandra getting her name rewritten in the Census.)

It took me multiple rewrites to write the sequence with Alexandra abandoning her name and taking up her Name to my satisfaction.

Hero of Her Own Story

“Are you caught up yet? Have you started to realize that there are actors on the stage even when you’re not around?"

— Archibald Mudd

“You may be the hero of your own story, but others have stories too.”

— Hela Punuk

As I said, I generally avoid explaining my intended themes, or really, any of my intent. I've written posts before about Death of the Author, but while I don't think the author's intent is wholly irrelevant (knowing what the author was going for can help you contextualize the story), it's really external to the story itself. The author isn't there to explain things to you. The author might not have thought through the implications of what he wrote. And each person's experience of the story is their own.

So when I read "Inverarity wanted us to feel–" or "Inverarity was trying to—" Well, I probably wasn't. I don't expect you to feel any particular way about Anna dying. I know how I felt, and I can predict how some readers will feel, but if you think "We are supposed to be sad about Anna dying, but I was not sad, therefore Inverarity failed to make this sad," well, no. It means your reaction might not be the same as someone else's. If I were asking you personally, "How could I write this scene so it would make you feel sad?" I'd probably care how you think it should have been written. Otherwise, the important thing for me is that it expressed what I was trying to express and advanced the plot and character development in the way I intended.

Anna's death, of course, was important mostly because of its impact on Alexandra. And her dying off-screen was a very deliberate choice.

One of the themes I like to repeat is that Alexandra is the star of her own series, but she's not the only person in the world. I was trying to show, throughout this book, that big things are going on and other people are doing things even when Alexandra isn't around. Abraham Thorn and the Thorn Circle were very busy without her. Anna and David and Larry, et al, were all off doing their own things when she wasn't around. She can't be part of every pivotal event, she can't be a participant in every major battle (let alone the decisive factor), and other characters are actively doing things and pursuing their own agendas and sometimes changing the world independently of her.

Alexandra is powerful, willful, and agentic, but she's still just one teenage girl. Her story does intentionally echo Harry's, and Harry was very much a Chosen One protagonist. But I had problems with how Harry was sometimes represented as being the decisive factor even when he was pretty passive. I write differently, and I wanted to show that Alexandra has choices and her choices affect the course of events, but events will still happen regardless of what choices she does or doesn't make.

A long-winded way of saying yeah, I killed Anna off-screen, I had the war end off-screen, and I had characters tell her to her face that the universe doesn't revolve around her, because that was kind of the point.

I'm Not Brandon Sanderson and this is not a LitRPG

So here is where I am going to complain a little about a certain kind of reader (and if you are that kind of reader, no offense, just know that I'm possibly not your kind of writer).

Some readers really, really like elaborate and finely detailed magic systems and a cosmology that is laid out and explicated with the precision of an RPG supplement.

And I am certainly capable of doing that. I have in the past. As a long-time GM and writer of RPG rules (and I've even published character sheets for Alexandra!) I understand the value of rigor and quantification, and the satisfaction of seeing things "work" logically. And how fun it is to compare and speculate about "Who's more powerful?"

However – I have never seen the AQ-verse as that kind of universe. Yes, magic has rules. But magic is also mysterious and ineffable and doesn't always make sense.

JK Rowling earned much praise for the logic and consistency of her magic system when, uh, it really isn't. Sure, she laid down a few rules and Laws of Magic and a bunch of elements randomly borrowed from myth and folklore, but her wizard world is full of inconsistencies and unexplained things. No need to go into them here; people have been writing posts and articles about this for over 20 years now. But I don't really think this is a flaw, in itself.

Look, let's be real here; a "wizard world" does not make any kind of sense and I don't care how grittily realistic you try to get with your Indy!Harry story, you can't make it make sense. It's inherently silly if taken at face value. (Psst. So are superheroes. All of them. Every single superhero story ever. Silly and unbelievable. All. Of. Them.)

So your world should have internal consistency and not break rules you create for yourself, but that doesn't mean every damn thing needs to be explained or quantified. Magic, in Rowling's world and in mine, is a strange force that wizards can sort of harness in predictable and repeatable ways, but it's not completely knowable and sometimes it just breaks the laws of physics and reason.

I don't say that as an excuse to handwave away inconsistencies, but I have kind of a grievance with Brandon Sanderson and his many fans and imitators. Sanderson likes carefully laying out a magic system that is as precise and quantifiable as atomic theory. And you know what that makes magic? Physics! It's just physics rewritten with different rules. Sanderson's magic is just science and technology with fantasy chrome.

There is nothing wrong with that. I have read a lot of Sanderson myself. But magic doesn't need to be like that and in classic folklore (which Rowling draws on much more than she draws on contemporary fantasy fiction), magic is always a little weird, mysterious, and not something you can nail down with enough research.

So people who want me to make the World Away and Alex's return from the dead and the Compact and everything else I've dropped into the universe "make sense" – like I said, I have answers for how all these things work to my satisfaction, but it may never be to yours.

On a related note, if there is one critique of Alexandra that really kind of annoys me, it's not "She's unlikeable." (Like, get over it? Or stop reading? She is who she is, though I thoroughly disagree that she never changes, grows, or learns.)



No, it's that Alexandra doesn't think of herself as a character in an RPG and does not act accordingly. I blame Sanderson, RPGs, and progression fantasy for this. Some readers will see what Alexandra does and say "Why didn't she (use some clearly superior spell or tactic, optimized for maximum efficiency and XP gain)?" I saw a lot of complaints to the effect that she sometimes acts precipitously, does the first thing that comes to mind, and doesn't go back and loot the bodies, figuratively speaking. She doesn't engage in lengthy dialogs with people who might have some additional information that would be useful to her, like she's wandering through a game trying to activate all those info pop-ups.

Like, really folks. I know when you are playing a game, you can mash buttons and consult menus and deliberate over your choices, but real people can't actually do that. Alexandra is smart and has quicker wits than most people (like, do you think you could do better?) but if I wrote Alexandra able to always do the most optimized thing, she'd be a LitRPG character. I think she's smart and often she does think through her best choices, but she's not an Indy!Harry leveling up each chapter, and she forgets and overlooks things, and sometimes she's just too upset, or frightened, or exhausted, to do the thing you think is obvious.

And wizards are not superheroes. They are just people who can do magic under the right conditions. (I know some fanfiction writers disagree with this and treat wizards as some sort of Homo Superior, which I think is weird.) Alexandra Quick is a very powerful witch. Physically and psychologically, she's an ordinary 17-year-old human girl. She might have "plot armor" that makes it unlikely her story will end with someone just walking up to her and stabbing her, but as Hela demonstrated, she's not "too powerful" to get taken out like that. Even Abraham Thorn wasn't.

Do You Even Have a Plan?

Yes.

I have said for years now that I have the entire series planned out, including the ending. Some parts of it are fuzzier than others; I know the milestones and the destination, but I usually don't know the road there until I start writing it.

When I wrote book one, things were somewhat less fixed in my mind. It was my first book and I had an idea that I might write a whole series, but little confidence that I would actually follow through. So I did plant a lot of seeds that I hoped I could make bloom later, but it wasn't until I started writing book two that I really knew where a lot of things were going. (I did know, while I was writing book one, that Claudia was Abraham's daughter and not Alexandra's mother, and who Galen was, and also that Larry and Alex would someday be a thing. And that Anna had a crush on Alex. And I had family trees drawn out for Alexandra and Anna and the Pritchards. Lots of things were planned all the way back then.)

I knew Anna was going to die when I started writing book two. I knew Innocence was going to die when I introduced her. I had the Exodus planned, and Constance and Forbearance staying, and the Battle of Charmbridge. The Deathly Regiment really took shape in book two (in book one, I had already thought of the seven-year tiend from the Elect, but not all the details), as did Darla's arc.

Lots of individual scenes and events have been planned for years. But that is not to say nothing develops organically as I am writing. A lot of characters and plot twists came to me as I was writing a particular book, so it wasn't all preplanned. (Hela was initially just a side character I created while writing book five.) But the big things? Almost all of them were.

And the ending? The finale to the Alexandra Quick series? That's been planned since the beginning. I've already written both Epilogues.

Book Seven

So, book seven.

It will be the last. And I do intend to finish it (buses and meteor strikes notwithstanding). Like I said, I have two (2) Epilogues written for it, and I can tell you all the twists, all the big reveals, all the answers, are things I have had planned for a long time.

Are all your questions going to be answered? Well… probably not. Will some of them be answered? I sure hope so.

I've outlined it and started writing it. (I've got the first two chapters plus the Epilogues done.) No ETA on completion. Learned my lesson - if I wrote as fast as I used to, you'd see it some time next year, but let's be real, given my track record, that won't happen. And I would kind of like to work on some of my other writing projects as well. But I do feel quite confident that I'm not going to lose steam or motivation, so while it may not come as soon as you'd like, it will come.

In the process of writing it, I expect some changes will happen and some things will be added or altered that weren't in my original plan. Like I said, I know the milestones, but not what the road looks like to get there yet. There are always changes and things I decide to drop in with sudden inspiration (or on a whim). And sometimes things I think I was going to do, just can't fit. (I had a big scene with William that basically didn't make it into AQATWW because, well, it just didn't work out. I couldn't make the pieces move together to let it happen the way I wanted.)

However, I can tell you that ALEXANDRA QUICK AND THE END OF TIME will be what I want it to be.