So I kept writing the story, and it kept getting longer, and stranger. I could tell by this point that it wasn’t any sort of normal. It wasn’t doing the things a proper sort of story should do. It was, by all traditional metrics, a mess.

But here’s the thing. I liked it. It was weird and wrong and tangled and missing so many things that a story is supposed to need. But it kinda worked. Not only was I learning a lot about Auri and the Underthing, but the story itself had a sort of sweetness to it.

Whatever reason, I let the story develop according to its own desire. I didn’t force it into a different shape or put anything into it just because it was supposed to be there. I decided to let it be itself. At least for now. At least until I made it to the end. Then I knew I’d probably have to wield the editorial hatchet, performing cruel surgery in order to turn it into something normal. But not yet.

You see, I’d actually been down this road before. The Name of the Wind does a lot of things it’s not supposed to. The prologue is a laundry list of things you should never do as a writer. But despite all that, it works. Sometimes a story works because it’s different. Maybe this was that kind of story…

But when I wrote the eight-page scene with Auri making soap I realized that was not the case. I was writing a trunk story. For those of you who don’t know the term, a trunk story is something you write, then when it’s finished you put the manuscript in the bottom of a trunk and forget about it. It’s not the sort of story you can sell to a publisher. Not the sort of story people want to read. It’s the sort of story that you write, then on your deathbed you remember it and ask a close friend to burn all your unpublished papers. Right after they clear your browser history, of course.

I knew Bill at Sub Press was delightfully open to strange projects, but this? No. No, this was a story I had to write to get out of my head. I had to write it to learn about Auri and the world. (Which is named Temerant, by the way, did you catch that?)

Simply said, I knew this story was for me. It wasn’t for other people. Sometimes that happens.

But still, I liked it. It was strange and sweet. I’d finally found Auri’s voice. I’m rather fond of her. And I’d learned a lot about writing in the third person, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.