Man, that last chapter kicked my ass. It's hard to deliberately write a chapter where the character is purposely performing in a void--and reacting to said void. What can you do aside from have him react with 'this wasn't here before...'? There's only so many times you can have him have that reaction, and even when he figures it out, you can only have him think 'what should I do to change this' so many times before he finally does something about it.

That said--this chapter was pretty short, probably about five pages, and may or may not stay (bringing up the question "well, why write it in the first place?!??"), but it's done now, so there ya go. If I do use it, it'll most likely be retooled a bit, and a lot of additions in earlier scenes to build it up--specifically, building up the reason why he reacts to the void the way he did. Nothing too involved, just some character actions in earlier scenes that should build up to this.

So if anything...I probably have four more chapters to write, and then I'll be done. I've already done a bit of outlining--that is, the outlining I've done in the past, where I make very vague mapping notes on who ends up doing what, and where they end up. In this case, I made a list of all the primary and secondary characters and a word or two on their setting, to be used as triggering keywords. Most of them have been taken care of, but I now have four columns sigifying the next chapters. These columns basically just have the character names in them, with headers being another trigger keyword: Vigil, Trisanda, Denni, and Denouement.

That's pretty much how I've outlined in the past, and it's worked well for me. Doing an extended one like I did with Can't Find My Way Home probably hindered that story more than helped it...but that's another writing post altogether. For now, I'm working off this piece of paper (originally drawn up at work, natch). Hopefully if all works out, I'll have everything done by next month.

Woohoo, the trilogy's nearly finished!! :D