A new writing experience

I’m pretty much done with the writing part of a new book, and it’s been quite a different writing process from my others.

With both The Altimer and New Gaia there is broadly one true path through the book, and so the intuitive way to write was to do it in a relatively linear way.

The new book, Escape From Portsrood Forest, is much more non-linear. It has just over 50 distinct locations, all of which can be visited in any order from any direction and multiple times. So there’s been a challenge to write them such that they make sense to the reader regardless of whether they’ve just started out their adventure or are about to conclude it.

I don’t know whether it’s just this particular book – perhaps the genre, which is a sort of comic mythical fairy tale high fantasy, or the storyline, which is essentially an escape room built around retracing your steps from the previous night’s escapades – but I’ve found the writing experience for this very fun.