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Constraints and Compromises: Why Line Edits Need Rules

At the end of February, I submitted my line edits for The Animals We Became, my next book — a queertrans retelling of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi (the story of Blodeuwedd) exploring gender, trauma, and compulsory heterosexuality through assorted nonconsensual animal transformations and all the other fascinating horrors of medieval Welsh literature.

Line edits are never a fast or easy process for me, but these took me five and a half months, which is considerably longer than I’ve ever spent on a similar edit — with my YA books, I don’t think I was ever given more than six weeks to turn around an edit, and sometimes it was closer to four. In hindsight, I don’t know how I ever managed that, save that I would put my entire life on hold while working on it; part of the problem this time was that due to health issues and academic deadlines, there were large chunks of time during that period when I was unable to work on my edits at all. When I did finally come to rewrite the book, it took me less than a month to do so… but it was getting there that was the hard part, as we’ll see.

I have an unconventional approach to editing, perhaps, and tend to tackle structural edits by opening a new document next to the old one and writing the book again, because to work within the same document feels stifling. I find myself too limited by what’s already there, unwilling to make radical changes, and the result is always worse. When I write in a new document, whole chunks of text will survive, but they’ll be retyped word by word, because if it’s not worth retyping then it’s not worth keeping. I’m sometimes quite aggressive in my edits, cutting whole chunks of the book and reworking major plot points, but eventually, I’ll wrangle things into shape. It’s labour intensive, but it works.

Still, by the time I get to line edits, I’ve usually set aside the separate document and embraced the world of tracked changes. My usual approach is to read the book aloud, checking for unintentional rhyme or repetition, refining the rhythm and style of each sentence, making sure that syllables fall where I want them to and alliteration is deployed where most effective or avoided where awkward. Line edits are a time for nitpicking and accuracy, so elements may get rewritten or reworked, but these are usually sentences rather than paragraphs, details rather than scenes.

I began like this in the autumn, but something was wrong. I could tweak and polish each sentence all I liked, but I wasn’t happy with The Animals We Became, and I couldn’t pin down why. It was a strange time to be working on it, with reviews coming in for The Wolf and His King before and after the UK publication in November, and I found myself experiencing a kind of Second Book Dread that I’d never experienced before. Although this will be my fifth published novel, it’s my first time having to write something that is both similar enough to a previous book to have some overlap of audience while also being very different in tone and not a direct follow-up, and the pressure of expectations and the knowledge that I would inevitably disappoint some of them started to get to me.

It was the positive reviews for The Wolf and His King that were troubling me the most, because many of the things that people seemed to like were things that were not in The Animals We Became. Some were never intended to be — this was never a romantic book, and I’d resigned myself to disappointing those who thought I was going to write romance from now on — but others nagged at me, because I didn’t quite like that they weren’t there, either. The depth of academic research and historical detail was far less visible in this book than in TWAHK, for example, and while that didn’t mean it hadn’t been part of my writing process, I began to feel increasingly less confident in the choices I’d made that were rendering it so much less obvious.

What I was missing, I realised eventually, was constraints to work within. Rules to push back against.

My books thrive on argument, little as I enjoy it at the time: I have problems with authority, and I need something to rebel against, a constraint to struggle within. With my YA books, these constraints were usually editorial: tight word limits, things I was told I couldn’t do in YA, requests to clarify more while somehow not adding any words, etc. My editors would give me a series of seemingly impossible and incompatible instructions and I would argue with the ones I disagreed with and then do what I could to reconcile the compromises with the text. Very often, suggestions I received weren’t directly actionable, but they revealed a problem that did need fixing somehow, and the compromise on how to do that would lead to a better result. The struggle to enact those changes within the word limits and while conforming to the expectations of category and genre would often produce scenes and details that were better than the version I created on my own.

With The Wolf and His King, the constraints were more self-imposed. One of the main constraints I imposed on myself was in the use of language, and my attempt to avoid anachronistic concepts in an attempt to immerse myself more fully in my characters’ worldviews and perspectives. In general, the historical setting provided most of the rules I found myself pushing back against: how could I make this work in the setting? What did this mean in the setting? What were the implications of this action, how would this emotion be expressed, what would characters fear or desire about this in the setting?

The rules weren’t so tight as to become stifling, because I knew that I could, at any point, escape. I’d promised myself that anachronisms were permissible for narrative reasons, and my author’s note at the beginning gave me a Get Out Of Jail Free card with regard to using them. If I did so, though, it would need to be with intention — I would need to genuinely think it was worthwhile, that it made the story better, rather than simply being easier. And I didn’t want to resort to them, because avoiding them was more useful.

A sidenote: my author’s notes always claim less fidelity to the rules than I actually aimed for while writing. I am actually much more precise and nitpicky than I pretend to be, but if I tell you that, you might nitpick me right back. But it’s also that the nitpicking at my end is, ultimately, a means to an end, not the end in itself. It’s not about whether the book is Historically Accurate For The Sake Of Being Historically Accurate; it’s about whether striving for historical accuracy helped me enter more fully into my characters’ minds and the world they lived in, in order to create something that rang true.

The real value of those constraints, I realised, was that they cut me off from the path of least resistance. They closed the door to cliché and to generic choices. They forced me to act with intention, rather than out of convention; they made me interrogate what I was doing, and decide what I valued about it. Arguing with editors or myself about whether to keep a detail that didn’t follow the Rules helped me realise if that detail mattered — or if there was one I could come up with that would satisfy me and follow the rules, potentially forcing me to do something more original and more creative in order to make it work.

These were not constraints that could be imposed at the start of writing. They worked because they happened at the editorial stage — and more, because they happened late in the editorial process, when tearing it all up and starting again from scratch wasn’t an option. The struggle to improve a scene became the effort to reconcile what was on the page with the rules I wanted to follow, and it was in the reconciliation that I would usually find a better version of the scene, one that felt fresher and more interesting than the more generic option that preceded it.

And the trouble with The Animals We Became was that I didn’t have any constraints.

Editorially, the book had had far less intervention than anything else I’d written. I drafted it in February 2023 and it was this first draft that my editor read, with no earlier beta readers, feedback, or redrafts before it entered the publishing process. Structural edits were reasonably light, at which point I sought out some beta readers, because I realised I needed more perspectives to wrestle with, more questions to answer, more misinterpretations to help me realise when I’d been unclear. I needed readers who didn’t know the story it was based on, too, so I could tell whether it made sense without context.

My first attempt at line edits, following this beta reader feedback, resulted in more than twenty thousand words being added to the book, so I asked for a second round. This I got, but I fear my editor likes my writing too much: she left 83 revisions on the document, promising me that it only needed some fine tuning. But something was wrong, and the more I tried to fine-tune it, the more I thought I might have strung it with completely the wrong strings.

The problem, I realised, was that there were no rules. I had added thirty thousand words to the book since the first draft, and it hadn’t been a problem; I wasn’t frantically trying to cut them. My editor’s 83 revisions did not provide a great deal of significant resistance to grapple with. I hadn’t set myself linguistic restrictions — I had deliberately chosen not to — so I didn’t have the same vocabulary constraints. And I’d set the story in a semi fantasy world (geographically Wales, chronologically non-specific, as in the original tale, and culturally fictional) which meant there were no rules there either: I didn’t have to worry about historical accuracy. I even had magic to help me escape any overly difficult questions about technology.

I could do whatever I wanted. And I had. But without anything to fight against, without resistance, with no specific paths along which to channel my creativity, it had began to slip along the well-worn tracks of easy answers.

Left to myself, I had created something generic. Not entirely generic, nor entirely without value, but something that lapsed more often than I liked into conventional patterns and ideas. Everything from architecture to household structure was just a little bit… uninterrogated, owing as much to modern pop culture ideas of The Past to any genuine world. And it was not, to my mind, anywhere near as Welsh as I’d wanted it to be, despite having known since I set out that this was a priority. (I’m not taking eight hours a week of Welsh lessons for no reason!)

I’ve been haunted throughout the writing process by the thought of my academic colleagues reading this book: several of them have been kind enough to read The Wolf and His King, but, well, if I’m honest with you, my main anxiety is that there’s considerably more sex in The Animals We Became and I have to go to conferences with these people. 💀 I realised, though, that my prudishness was fading beneath a greater and far more important concern about how this book would read as an interpretation of the text, and as a way of engaging with medieval Welsh literature, and as the latest instalment of English-language textual reception of the Mabinogi, etc.

And, okay, you can’t think about this too much. You’ll go mad. A novel is not an academic thesis; my narrative interpretations are not necessarily my academic ones; what makes a good modern fantasy novel is not necessarily what I think a medieval author intended; the themes I am using the Fourth Branch to explore are not necessarily ones I think are present in the same way in the original text, and so on. While I do find fiction a valuable way of exploring and understanding medieval literature, I am ultimately writing my story using an older narrative, not analysing the one that exists. Moreover, this is a queertrans book about gender and trauma and there are going to be those who are hostile to that because the field of Celtic Studies can, at times, be fairly conservative; these are not people it is worth trying to please.

But. It wasn’t that I wanted to please them. It was just that I wanted to be able to stand behind my own work. To say, yes, I did that on purpose. Yes, this was an interpretative choice I made. Yes, I had to decide how to handle that and this is what I decided to do. I found myself reaching for author’s notes, justifications, lists of Further Reading, as though this might prove I’d done my research. It was, I realised, insecurity, because I didn’t feel those things were visible in the text, and I wanted to prove I knew them anyway.

By the time I’d completed my first pass of these line edits, reading aloud and tweaking individual sentences — which took much longer than planned — I’d realised that I was academically unhappy with the setting and the choices I’d made. I didn’t want an author’s note to be the only place my expertise was visible! And I especially didn’t want the setting to be Generic Fantasy World Superimposed On North Wales — I’d never wanted it to be that, but I’d somehow failed to avoid it, because when I decided against certain constraints (a particular century in the real historical past, for example), I hadn’t imposed enough others in their place.

It was a perfectly good fantasy novel, I guess, but it wasn’t the story I was trying to tell, because it wasn’t engaging with the Fourth Branch on the level that I wanted it to.

Too late, I realised the constraints that were missing, the rules I should have been following, the research I needed to incorporate. Too late, I could see what the book needed to rescue it from sliding into a pit of Uninterrogated Genre Conventions. Perhaps, if the book had had years to stew (as I always prefer), I would have figured this out before I got this stage; perhaps if I’d had more beta readers; perhaps if I hadn’t been suffering from migraine-related brain fog that left me unable to maintain complex thought for months on end… But the circumstances were what they were, and there I was, with a book I suddenly knew how to fix but didn’t have time to.

In my second pass, I rewrote certain scenes and chapters, frantically burying myself in research materials. But it needed more than that, and having finally glimpsed what the book needed to be a decent retelling of the Fourth Branch, rather than merely a decent fantasy novel, I wasn’t prepared to let it go. So despite the knock-on effect this would have on academic deadlines, I found myself asking for an extension. My editor, though she reassured me that she thought the book was in good shape already, granted me the extra time, and then I rewrote the book properly, this time with a much better understanding of my own personal rules for how the narrative and its world worked.

When I finally gave it back at the end of February, there were more like 8,300 revisions in the document than 83, and it crashed my laptop every time you tried to interact with one of those tracked changes. (I’d rewritten it in a separate document, and used “compare changes” to produce a version tracking them — it was the only way it was viable.)

It’s… better. I’m academically much happier with it. I think it’s doing something more interesting; I think it’s engaging more meaningfully with its setting; I think engaging with the setting is more than just interesting background noise but actively contributes to the main themes; I think pulling it apart like this enabled me to see certain other flaws and fix them. There are choices that some people will disagree with, but which I made because they suited my themes, or because they were interesting to me, or because there was simply no Right Answer to a particularly thorny question of interpretation and I chose this one as being the one I could live with. I think I can stand behind them now, because I have thought about why I did them, and I’ve done them on purpose.

It would, however, have been nice if I’d realised two years earlier that this was what I needed to do — or perhaps two months earlier.

Because, as I’m realising, it’s the process of trying to wrestle existing material into shape that often makes imposing rules on one’s world and narrative valuable, far more than trying to write something that fits within them in the first place. It’s the push and pull of having to make it work within an existing structure, when you can’t simply extend the scene indefinitely or completely alter the setup. It’s the way it forces you to question what you value enough to keep, and what can easily be overwritten with something new.

The book isn’t finished yet. We have copyedits yet to go, and I’ve asked that the copyeditor errs on the side of too many comments rather than too few, because I’ve realised I need to be put in a position of defending my narrative choices if I’m going to stand by them. And while I am quite good at challenging myself — I hold myself to high standards, and always have done — I almost failed this time. Not because I couldn’t see that there was a problem, but because both figuring out the problem and how to fix it turned out to be almost too much for me, and I didn’t know what rules I was trying to follow until it was nearly too late.

Too few rules, it turns out, makes it too easy to take the path of least resistance and write the less interesting version of your book. You need something to wrestle with to force creativity, whether that’s a tight word limit or an editorial argument or a strict conformity to historical accuracy or never using the letter E or making every paragraph start with a certain letter of the alphabet or a rhyme scheme or metrical rule or incorporating a particular series of medieval laws or whatever set of constraints you ultimately impose. Yes, in some ways, it’s about making life harder for yourself — but that’s because cutting off the “easy” options is what cuts off clichés and generic choices.

Perhaps, now that I’ve articulated this to myself, it will be easier in future to realise that I need to identify my constraints earlier in the line edits process. But perhaps they’re something that can only be determined through wrestling with the book in the first place, trying to understand why it isn’t clicking.

I don’t know. All I know is that eventually, I hope, I got there. It has been a difficult five and a half months, and I’m quite burned out, for all that I feel I have little to show for it, but while some days produced no words or visible progress, maybe they too were part of the process of wrestling with the book.

Or maybe I was simply wrestling with my brainfog, and should cut myself some slack, because it’s hard enough writing books and doing a PhD while chronically ill as it is.

The Animals We Became will be published by Gollancz on 26 November 2026, and you can pre-order it now (more links to follow as they filter through to other retailers).

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A Handful of Book Thoughts

It’s been a long time since I blogged, mostly because I felt like I had already said everything there was to say about my writing process, about The Wolf and His King, or about the delicate dance of balancing PhD and fiction, and anything else I wrote on the subject would be a repeat. Until something more interesting happened, I was post-less.

But, well, it occurred to me that I could resolve this by simply not talking about myself, so here are a few of the books I’ve been reading recently. I get most of my recommendations via friends at this point, but a couple of these have been things I’ve seen people posting about on social media — even just as a “currently reading” with a one-line summary that I spotted in passing — so this is a regular reminder that if you like a book, you should post about it, so that other people can check it out and read it :)

A couple of these were also impromptu buddy reads with a friend, so some of their opinions probably rubbed off on me, but only because I agreed with them.

[All UK Bookshop.org links in this post are affiliate links, so if you buy these books via those links, I will earn a small commission. But, you know, buy them wherever, or get them from your local library, etc. The self-pub titles in this list aren’t available on Bookshop so I’ve linked elsewhere.]

The genre of “magical academia” (often with a subtheme — or primary theme — of grappling with colonialism and exclusionary hierarchies of knowledge) is an increasingly large one, and I’m both a sucker for it and incredibly fussy. I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at an impressionable age, and unfortunately it set my standards for nerdy magic to a height that few books can live up to. The trouble is that my interest is really in the academic side of the magic, and so often this is a bit of an afterthought, playing second fiddle to the aesthetics of scholarship. (I’ve also spent far too much of my life living and working in Cambridge, a popular location for many of these books, and frequently bounce off their depictions of this city or am warned off them by equally nitpicky friends before I can get angry about them. It’s a common affliction, if my friend group is anything to go by.)

However, there were a couple of books in this genre that I’ve read recently and which pleasantly exceeded my expectations. First, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry, which had a satisfying amount of actual academia and research, and characters who seemed genuinely interested in the topic they’d dedicated their life to. It also wrangled a clever setting get-out clause by creating a magical university outside of normal space/time that is connected to both Cambridge and Oxford, thus allowing it to borrow aspects of both universities’ vibes and setup without being set at either, saving it from any accusations of inaccuracy by annoying pedants like me. This setting is pretty crucial to the overarching plot and themes, too, so it’s not just a gimmick.

Next, Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang leans more heavily into the fantastical elements with a fully secondary world rather than a magical one that otherwise resembles ours, and deals with, essentially, a magical postdoc — the first woman to achieve her position, but it’s more of a glass cliff than a groundbreaking step forward, and now that she’s on the inside she’s able to see better the system she’s complicit in. While I didn’t entirely love how this book tackled gender, I thought it did some interesting things with colonialism and power, some of which were effectively achieved by having a deeply unlikable and flawed character: a woman fixated on the gender inequality she’s disadvantaged by, to the point of ignoring the other privilege she experiences and the violent power structures she’s helping to perpetuate, including the power she holds over racially minoritised men. Her flaws and unpleasantness, as much as her gradual improvement, provided a nuanced narrative challenge to her simplistic ‘Girl Power’ narrative, though I still would have liked to see a less cisheteronormative world to further dig into intersectional power structures. The ending surprised me as I’ve grown overly used to books pulling their punches, which this one doesn’t.

On the subject of unlikeable characters, Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake provides plenty of those, but manages to keep the reader’s attention and investment with a lively and engaged narrative voice that proves not to be quite as objective or omniscient as it claims at the start. I’ve read a few of Blake’s books now; The Atlas Six didn’t entirely win me over, but I enjoyed both Masters of Death and Alone With You In The Ether, and those along with Gifted and Talented have fun approaches to narrative form that luxuriate in the ability of prose to Do Something for the story, rather than function only as the “invisible” glass window type of prose that seems to be fashionable these days. I like a book that knows it’s a piece of writing and is doing something with that, playing with form and style, rather than only trying to represent in sentences what you might see on a screen and thus offering itself as a poor imitation of a camera. (I’m thinking of going back to The Atlas Six, since it might just have caught me on a bad day. I’m also not sure if I read the self-pub version or the revised trad-pub version, but I think it was the former, so perhaps the latter would have resolved the issues that meant I didn’t love it as much. It was certainly enough years ago that my opinions might have changed even if the book hasn’t.)

Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin was a chance Libby read, but one that got me right in the feelings — possibly more than I was entirely prepared for. (It even came in with a hot take about Comrac Fir Diad that made me cry, not that that’s too hard, because everything about Comrac Fir Diad makes me cry and I’ve been thinking about it more than usual recently due to the particular stage I’m at with my PhD.) It’s the kind of book that probably hits particularly hard if you’re (ex-)Catholic, Irish, or both, and I’m notably neither, but I spend enough time around people in those demographics that enough of it has rubbed off not to need to google the references and allusions. I really liked how this one uses Hiberno-English, too; it’s a very Irish-feeling book, an effect exacerbated by having just read something beforehand that was ostensibly set in Ireland but in which all of the dialogue sounded extremely English. But if you’re not mentally in a position to be reading about dead siblings or Feelings About Religion (especially feelings about the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the twentieth century, but also about faith itself), then this one might be too much.

I’m exceptionally late to the party with Heresy by S.J. Parris, first published in 2011, but despite the slightly overwhelming sense that the protagonist is the Specialest Guy around whom all great events revolve and in whom everybody is unduly interested, I had a good time with this historical mystery; I liked the sixteenth century setting, and how it engaged quite deeply with the intellectual and material culture of the period without over-explaining every little detail to readers, as some historical novels do. I also find that not enough historical novels actually grapple with religion and philosophy of the period, but that criticism definitely can’t be levelled at this one (as the title suggests). I’ve got the next book waiting for me on Libby.

Over in the more romantic corner, I enjoyed Edge of Nowhere by Felicia Davin for an m/m romance with a bunch of weird and interesting sci-fi worldbuilding along with it: teleportation with a complex twist. I particularly enjoyed the cats named after physicists. I confess that I read this one very late at night when I was failing to go to bed, so my thoughts are less analytical or coherent than they might have been, but I’m very much looking forward to diving into the sequels to this one too.

It was from Felicia Davin’s newsletter that I heard about the ‘Wisconsin Gothic’ series, with the first book being Dionysus in Wisconsin. The blurb mentioned ghosts, which are generally a hard no for me (Creeping Dread is my least favourite reading experience, so haunted houses are right out) but I got the impression they were a sufficiently small aspect of the story that it was worth taking a risk. This paid off — I read the first three books in this series within 24 hours — I actually paused writing this post because I’d started the first one and knew I was going to end up including it — and only in the third one did ghosts really start to pay a significant role, but even there, they weren’t the type that strongly bother me. (The spiders, on the other hand… I didn’t love the spiders!)

The ‘Wisconsin Gothic’ books could probably have come under my ‘magical academia’ heading, though they’re down here in the romantic zone because there’s a central m/m relationship and also because it was a nice segue from Davin. They’re a different subgenre of magical academia than the two above, though: rather than a story about academia that’s actually about colonialism, represented by some kind of magical force, system, power source etc, it’s a story in which academics, some of whom are researching magic, use research (and magic) to deal with magic problems, and also research. This is actually my favourite variety of magical academia, particularly when the characters are intensely knowledgeable about things like rare books and the challenges of translating medieval texts, both of which this series delivers. It’s set in the late 60s/early 70s in (you’ve guessed it) Wisconsin, so there’s some interesting background tension about the Vietnam War and other politics of the period. This is not a setting I know much about, being a 90s-born Brit whose historical knowledge generally skews a few centuries earlier, but it makes for a refreshing setting, as I don’t think I’ve read any other paranormal books set around then. There were a few … not exactly plot twists, but character twists, I guess, that I found strangely predictable and was confused that the characters didn’t seem to be joining those dots, but on the whole I’ve been racing through these and the fourth book is already on my Kindle.

Finally, I started, but bounced off, Looking for Group by Alexis Hall, but I think this was squarely about me and not about the book: it is a book aimed at an extremely specific audience, to which I don’t belong. I’m including it here nonetheless because I have a lot of respect for it as a book that engages with a niche interest (online multiplayer roleplaying games) and does it uncompromisingly and without over-simplifying it for outsiders. I like when I’m out of my depth with a character’s hyperspecific interests, because it makes them feel real; too often characters only seem to have the most surface-level engagement with their ostensible passion. However, I was just a bit too out of my depth with this one, and struggled to keep on top of all the gaming terminology and acronyms. It does make it very clear that it’s a gaming romance, for the record; I figured I’d give it a try because I’ve enjoyed other books by Alexis Hall, but I anticipated potentially not vibing with it. I think I was poorly served by reading it in ebook, where I couldn’t easily consult the glossary at the beginning, and where the annotations/footnotes (authorial commentary on the re-issue) were a distraction rather than an asset. But if you did play these kinds of games in your younger years — or still do — and were not merely, like me, casual Runescape players who only ever fished or mined and never did quests or killed anything larger than a spider, this one might be for you. May we all be able to find the hyperspecific nerdery that corresponds exactly to our own interests.

That’s all for now, I think, but let me know what you’re reading at the moment. Let me know, too, whether you’d like me to do more of these kinds of round-ups in future! I can’t guarantee doing it on any kind of regular schedule, since while I read a lot I am exceptionally fussy and sometimes go a fair while without reading anything I would like enough to include in a post like this, but I’m open to the concept.

The Wolf and His King comes out in under a month in the UK (on 27th November) and under three months in the US (27th January). Have you pre-ordered yet? Now’s a great time.

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On Tolkien And Drawing Fruit

After several years of constantly moving house, I finally settled long-term in the autumn of 2024, which means my parents are keen for me to sort through and reclaim or dispose of a lot of the stuff they’ve been looking after for the last ten years. Every time I come to stay, I’m invited to “do a bit of sorting”, an activity I approach with dread or avoid if at all possible — decision making isn’t my forte, and I am a deeply sentimental person who has to think seriously hard about whether they need a pile of notes from GCSE History despite the fact that I have been out of school for over a decade and the curriculum has changed significantly enough that nobody would really benefit from revision for an exam that no longer exists.

The need for this process has been accelerated by the fact that there will be a new baby in my family in the coming year, and so my parents are taking in several boxes of items to be kept but not urgently needed to make room for the baby at my sister’s house. As such, a ruthless cull of cupboards and underbed storage has been in progress, and over Christmas and New Year, I was drafted in to do my part.

In the process, I came across the final sketchbook from my GCSE Art exam, and it made me think about some specific writing discourse that’s been going around Bluesky recently. (Stick with me, it’ll make sense eventually.)

A tracing of a drawing of the composer Stravinsky.
Me, taking items out of a box: “I’ve found… this?”
My parents, immediately: “Ah, Stravinsky!”
Because of course there is a tracing of Stravinsky in this box. Why wouldn’t there be.

For those unfamiliar with the English school system or who were fortunate enough never to have anybody in their family take GCSE Art, it’s worth providing some context. GCSEs are national exams taken in year 11, usually age 16 (unless you’re very young for your year, and then might be 15). The number of subjects taken varies by school, but is usually around 9-12. The majority of these will be compulsory subjects, sometimes with wiggle room about the details — for example, it might be compulsory to do at least one modern foreign language, but you may be able to choose which one. Once all the compulsory subjects are out of the way, though, you get a couple of choices, usually the more creative subjects like Music, Art, Drama, Design & Technology, etc.

I did not, technically, choose Art. This is partly because I’d seen my older sister go through it, and I knew that it was fairly soul-destroying, requiring more time and effort than half the other subjects put together — and expensive, too, once you start buying materials. Far from an easy option, it was a gruelling commitment that would take over your life and also, if they were kind enough to help you by driving you to galleries, scrapyards, or National Trust properties to take photos and collect ideas/materials, your families’ lives. But I did put Art as my second choice, and when my first choice subject didn’t run due to lack of uptake, I ended up with it. Uh-oh.

I am fundamentally not a visual artist. As well as the chronic pain in my hands that would prevent me from ever spending enough time drawing to get good at it, my brain doesn’t seem to be wired in that way: I’m not great at translating 3D objects into 2D images and vice versa, and I have a very non-visual imagination, so it’s hard to create pictures in my head, even before I think about putting those down on paper. I struggle to recognise people IRL when I’ve only seen them in 2D on Zoom (and also in general; I am terrible at faces); my depth perception is poor and I have been known to open doors into my face; and when, at the end of year 10, we had a Still Life drawing exam, I failed it. I got an E: 37.5%.

I’m providing this as vital context because often when I say to people that I’m no good at drawing, they think I’m being humble, or exaggerating somehow. But no. I am genuinely not good at drawing.

Despite my year 10 grade, I got an A in GCSE Art overall, the result of working incredibly hard in year 11 and during the run-up to the final exam — and figuring out how to do that without ever having to draw an object or something from my own head. I’ve often referred to this self-deprecatingly as “gaming the system”, or dismissively pointed out that the exam mark scheme isn’t measuring artistic ability, just your ability to tick specific boxes, which I worked out how to tick. This isn’t untrue, but I think it’s an uncharitable reading of what I actually did, which is to figure out how to play to my strengths and use the skills I actually had.

A few examples of this:

  • We were given a list of themes to choose from for our final project. As a musician and dancer, I chose the prompt “Music & Dance”, so that I would be able to draw on my own interests and experience to shape the piece.
  • I chose a theme for my piece that would involve research, because then I could write up my findings, and writing is something I can do. My piece was themed around the Rite of Spring, so I had pages in the sketchbook about Stravinsky, Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, the original sets and costumes, modern sets and costumes, the history of the production, etc. (Now we understand the Stravinsky.)
  • I was better at the crafts side of arts & crafts: mixed media was going to be my friend. Not only did this mean less time struggling with a pencil, but it also gave me easy fodder for the “design development” side of the coursework: I could create the same piece in different media (paint, pastels, cardboard, clay, etc), document the process, write up what worked and didn’t work, and tick a ton of boxes that way.
  • Though I have never been any good at drawing from life or my imagination, I do have fairly good fine motor skills — I did a lot of crafts and calligraphy as a child. So I am good at copying pictures, especially with the help of things like the grid technique. We were often expected to do “artist copies” and, since I was pretty good at these, I created a piece that revolved around them: the backgrounds of my final piece were inspired by Roerich’s original set designs for the Rite of Spring, while the human figures in the piece drew on the costumes from the 2012 English National Ballet production (I was creating this piece in spring 2012, and went to see it). I copied pictures of costumes from theatre programmes and the internet, and used these alongside the write-ups to illustrate the development of my ideas.
  • I chose artists whose style suited mine. I was never going to be able to replicate a photorealistic style and trying would only have caused me grief, but I had a hope of a halfway convincing copy of Degas — and when you’re theming your piece around a ballet, he’s an obvious choice. I still have one of my Degas copies on the wall of my house. It’s not bad.

And so on, and so forth. Having failed my drawing exam, I identified what skills I didn’t have — still life drawing — and then, rather than continuing to struggle with that, figured out what skills I did have — research, writing, copying flat images, etc. While my final piece was still no masterpiece, I was genuinely impressed as I flicked through that sketchbook, not only because of the sheer amount of work that had gone into it but also how impressive the results had been.

A page from my GCSE Art sketchbook titled "Costume Design". On the left are drawings in coloured pencil of Nicholas Roerich's original designs for the Rite of Spring, with written discussion of the costumes. On the right are two pencil drawings of costumes used by the English National Ballet in 2012, one for the Rite of Spring and one for the Firebird.

After re-doing a bunch of my year 10 coursework with the skills I’d learned from this, I got a B for that, and an A* for the final project (sketchbook + exam piece), pulling me up to an A overall. Maybe I gamed the system and figured out how to tick boxes, yes — but maybe I learned an important lesson about using the skills I actually had to compensate for the ones I didn’t, and creating something that was not only better than anything I would create using those weaker skills, but also more “me”, because it drew on my interests and my abilities. And in doing so, I developed new skills and used those to improve my other work.

I’m not telling you all this to boast about 16-year-old me’s grades, though. So what does any of this have to do with writing discourse?

Well, while I try to stay out of these kinds of circular discussions and meaningless arguments these days for the sake of my sanity, I constantly see the same conversations circling again and again: does all fantasy fiction need a ton of “worldbuilding”? What is worldbuilding anyway: are we talking about the stuff that makes it onto the page of the book, or are we talking about producing huge amounts of off-page material, fully realising every detail of a world that characters will only see small parts of? Do you have to make up your own language to write secondary world fantasy? Do you have to create endless family trees and histories for all your characters?

Do you, in fact, need to be Tolkien?

These arguments are frequently circular, and the same things come round again. “Worldbuilding is for people who actually wanted to write a manual for a tabletop roleplaying game, not a novel,” one person will argue. “Every story has worldbuilding, even contemporary litfic,” another person will point out, “it’s about understanding how the characters and plot interact with the setting.” Someone else will say, “Maybe you guys are using two different definitions of worldbuilding. Are we talking about what’s in the book itself, or is this about the way some aspiring fantasy authors spent ten years creating a world without ever writing the book?”

Such attempts to clarify discourse are rarely as popular as black and white takes. Accusations will be made, sides will be taken, and people will keep coming back to the same arguments that seem to me to usually come down to talking across each other because nobody set out the definitions of the terms they were arguing with. (Admittedly, my attempts to stay out of this mean I usually see it all secondhand, so I’m sure there’s more going on that I don’t see.)

And when it comes to conlanging… well, there are good points well made on both sides. No, you shouldn’t just take a real, modern, marginalised language spoken by real human beings and declare it a magical fantasy language (as so often happens to Celtic languages in particular); conlanging avoids this kind of appropriation. But no, you also don’t have to create an entire language from scratch with a comprehensive grammar and extensive vocabulary before you’re allowed to think about writing secondary world fantasy; not every story needs this, and not every writer is suited to this.

It’s here that Tolkien’s shadow looms large, being one of the most notable creators of fantastical languages above and beyond what was needed for the story that actually made it onto the page. Yes, of course this adds a depth to his settings that few authors can match in this particular area — but does it matter that they can’t?

As I have seen pointed out, both on Bluesky and on Tumblr, Tolkien didn’t create languages because that was what fantasy authors were “supposed to do”: he did it because he was a philologist, and that was what interested him. He wasn’t forcing himself to muddle through an activity he didn’t enjoy and found difficult in order to meet an arbitrary standard of detail, he was using the skills and interests he already had to create something that interested him.

And, you see… not everybody is a medievalist. (I know, big if true.) Not everybody has academic expertise in linguistics. Not everybody needs to. They have their own skills, their own backgrounds, their own hobbies. But if everybody spends all their time feeling like they need the same skills and knowledge as everybody else in order to create art, what you end up with is worse art that is less original and has less to say. Interesting, detailed art comes from using your skills, knowledge, passion, and/or background to tell a story that only you could tell — not from forcing yourself to jump through a hoop that somebody else had a day job in walking through.

In other words, if you’re the kind of person to get 37.5% in a still life drawing exam, don’t create a final piece that consists of a pencil drawing of three apples and a glass jug. Figure out what skills you do have that will let you create interesting art that says something you, yourself, want to say.

My GCSE art sketchbook open to a page titled "Experimentation: medium" showing a step-by-step write-up of how I developed a piece with layers of painted cardboard, based on the original set design by Roerich, which features mountains around a lake. I'm holding the cardboard piece in question, which covers half the sketchbook.

That doesn’t mean never challenging yourself to draw a fruit ever again. If you want to develop a skill, because you love it but you’re just not there yet, then by all means start practising! But — and forgive me if I’m wrong here, because I am, as we have noted, not a visual artist — you don’t learn how to do still life by copying other people’s still life. Otherwise, I would be great at it by now. It’s not just about the mechanical act of pencil on a page: it’s about learning to look at an object, to perceive it, to understand how light and shapes and depth are working. It doesn’t come by only focusing on other people’s finished products: it means breaking it down into the skills involved, and learning how those work, and practising them, and figuring out what they look like for you.

For me, writing The Butterfly Assassin involved drawing several apples, most of them science-related — I haven’t done any science since I was sixteen. I do, however, have research skills, which I applied, and more than that, I have scientifically-minded friends, who helped me. I still didn’t attempt to mirror the scientific detail of a novel like This Mortal Coil, because unlike Emily Suvada, I didn’t study maths and astrophysics at university and I don’t have the kind of brain that lends itself to data science, hacking, and understanding genetic engineering. But despite shifting the focus away from scientific detail for the most part, I still found these elements disproportionately hard to write. I learned from doing it, but I also resolved that I wouldn’t do that again. Everyone in book two, I concluded, was getting stabbed, not poisoned, and if I needed a creative assassination method, I would find one another way — there are enough historical assassinations that I could borrow from that would only require historical research skills, rather than having to understand the science behind it to plan one from the ground up.

I cannot write like a scientist: I can only write like me.

Writing The Wolf and His King, by contrast, draws on my existing skills and knowledge as a medievalist. That doesn’t mean it has been easy, or that it hasn’t involved research. It’s been a challenge in its own way, demanding knowledge of historical details that I, as a literature expert, didn’t have; it’s tested my mastery of the English language and forced me to think hard about imagery and metaphors; it’s seen me in the University Library’s reading rooms consulting maps and non-borrowable books; it’s benefited from another year attending lectures about medieval French literature; it’s been constantly reworked and developed based on my reading and research. But those are skills I have, even if it’s not knowledge I already possessed. I have been able to pursue those questions in more detail than somebody without that background, and I’ve created something that feels like me in a way that gives it depth and layers.

I am no longer trying to figure out how to disguise my wonky apples so that people don’t realise my depth perception was off the whole time: I’m creating a mixed media piece of historical research chasing my own interests and passions to create a piece of art I care about. This is not to say that I think The Butterfly Assassin is bad — it’s no failed still life exam, I’m still plenty proud of it. But it stretched me perhaps in directions that I’m not naturally inclined to go, and I was constantly having to remind myself to write like me, to focus on what I was trying to do with the story, rather than trying to squash myself into an imagined box of Required Talents To Write Dystopian Thrillers.

That’s also not to say I will only ever write medieval fantasies in the future. There are all sorts of stories I want to tell, in different genres and with different emphases. But the older I get, the more I’m learning how to use my existing skills to do that, rather than trying to follow somebody else’s methods and wondering why I can’t perfectly replicate the results. And if one day I sit down and try to do the writing equivalent of still life drawing again — well, it will be because I decided I wanted to, and it would be the best way to tell the story I wanted to tell, not because I thought I had to do it if I wanted to be a good writer.

So, in the end, what I have to say about worldbuilding discourse is this:

  • All stories require you to understand their world. They don’t all require you to know the same things about it.
  • A book with an incredibly detailed world is not automatically better than a book with a lightly sketched outline of a world. A book that only needs a lightly sketched outline and has a ton of detail might feel bogged down in unnecessary info; a book that needs detail and doesn’t have it will feel inconsistent. It’s about what the story needs. See point 1.
  • Not every story that asks the same questions will need the same answers or find them in the same way. You don’t have to follow somebody else’s rules for developing a magic system or whatever if those rules aren’t serving the story you’re telling. It’s your story — see point 1.
  • If your goal is to write a book, eventually you need to stop developing background details and write the book. If you keep getting stuck on this, try writing the book first and then answer the questions it raises, rather than trying to predict the answers you need and creating the setting up-front. This will help make sure you spend time on things that are actually relevant, and even if it doesn’t work for you in the long run, it might help you break out of your current loop. But if you’re developing imaginary worlds for fun with no plans to write a book then there are no limits, you don’t have to stop, and I hope you have a good time.

And finally, the most important point, and the one that justifies this tortured artistic metaphor:

  • You don’t have to be Tolkien, especially if your skills and interests lie in different areas. Be the best you, not the worst copy. If you’re a natural sculptor, put down the pencil and go get yourself some marble.

The skills and knowledge and background and day job that you have are assets too, even if they don’t look obviously applicable to what you’re trying to write. Learn how to use them, and I’m pretty sure you’ll have more fun and make better art in the process. Which is, in the end, what it’s all about.

You can judge how well I applied my artistic skills by buying or pre-ordering my books! I promise they contain fewer tortured metaphors than this post.

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‘Tis The Season

Slightly upsettingly, it is now September.

Not only that, but it’s not even early September. It’s the 19th. Schools have been back for a good couple of weeks. There’s a distinctly autumnal chill to the air. The evenings are getting darker earlier and earlier. Summer, we are constantly reminded, is over.

I’m feeling this particularly acutely because, honestly, I don’t feel like my life has been “business as usual” since about April, if it can have been said to be normal then. From May through to early September was just one thing after another consuming my attention and my time and causing me to neglect… literally everything else in my life. Some of these things were academic commitments (conferences, PhD registration, etc), some were writing-related (Moth to a Flame‘s publication, line- and copyedits for The Wolf and His King) some were Life Events like moving house (again) (last time for a while), some were health related (my second bout of COVID, once again acquired in the Gaeltacht), and some were fun (going to the Gaeltacht, going to North Wales). All were good excuses to neglect my emails and my everyday work.

It’s just… well… when you neglect your emails and your work for four and a half months, you end up with a lot of emails and work to deal with. Tragic how that happens. And the summer is gone, and the months have passed, and the start of the university term fast approaches, and I have so much to do…

Anyway, I’m in the process of getting my life back under control, which might mean posting here slightly more often (another ball I dropped this summer), but first and foremost I am trying to process the fact that it is autumn again already, quite without me knowing how that happened, and that means two things:

One, it’s been a whole year since I began my readalong of The Butterfly Assassin, sharing extra worldbuilding details, insights into my writing process, old drafts, forgotten or abandoned character backstory, etc. Which means:

Two, we are once again in the time of year when The Butterfly Assassin takes place. The opening chapter takes place late at night on the 17th September and into the 18th September, and then we continue onwards from there, through to early December.

Last year’s “real time readalong” turned out to be pretty intense in the amount of work it involved for me, and I wouldn’t say it was entirely successful in luring blog readers and newcomers alike into the comment section to talk to me and each other, freeing ourselves from the shackles of centralised social media and enjoying the benefits of a quieter, ore focused platform. But it did get a few conversations started, and one of the major benefits of posting it all on here rather than on social media is that it’s all still there, and findable.

Which means anyone who wants to do a real-time readalong of The Butterfly Assassin this year can do so! All of the posts are there: you can follow them day by day as though I were posting them this year, you can binge-read the whole lot at once, you can dip in and out when there are chapters you particularly want to know more about, or you can ignore them entirely and focus on the book.

One thing’s for sure, though: this is definitely the most seasonally appropriate time to pick up The Butterfly Assassin, whether reading it for the first time or rereading. After all, who can resist the call of those relatable Back To School moments, like trying to hide the fact that you were raised to be an assassin, and, whoops, might have killed someone last night…

I actually really enjoyed looking back over some of the old readalong posts. There’s a lot there: a lot that I’ve talked about in bits and pieces at other times, but rarely have the chance to discuss at length (another major benefit of doing this on my own site is that nobody can impose a word limit on me and, boy, would I go over it if they tried). I should probably, at some point, sit down and come up with a concordance of topics I discussed in the readalong, so that when they come up in other contexts I can quickly pull a link to my longer discussions.

For example, I often find myself trying to articulate my back-to-front approach to worldbuilding, the way I start with a specific question and wind up looking at much bigger issues, but that’s a lot easier to comprehend with concrete examples, and the very first post contains a great rundown of that approach, as well as a look at a bunch of different opening scenes I tried. Yesterday’s post (18/09) outlines the Esperan education system that I spent so long devising just to make sure some dates matched up. Tomorrow’s post, for 20/09, delves into some of the more political aspects of the worldbuilding. And next week, on 27/09, we get a post exploring some of the context and backstory to Isabel’s health conditions (including the one that’s just me being mad about Age of Ultron), as well as the structure of Comma.

I’m not going to painstakingly share a link to every post on the correct day, both because I am far too disorganised and busy to take on that kind of responsibility, and because I think it would deeply annoy everyone who subscribes to this blog. Nevertheless, I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that they exist, and encourage those who are interest to glance over them. The internet loves to focus on “new content”, but just because these posts are from a year ago, doesn’t mean they’re worthless.

And I want to note that the comments are still open on those posts, and you are still incredibly welcome to discuss them, whether addressing your remarks to me or to others hanging out in the comment section. A big part of the purpose of the readalong was to start conversations, not merely to broadcast my thoughts at youse. I would love to talk.

Mostly, though, I’d just be grateful if you’d consider reading The Butterfly Assassin this autumn or, if you’ve already read it, writing a quick review or recommending it to a friend so it can reach somebody who hasn’t. I realise, however, that there are a great many other autumnal books out there, so this is also an invitation to tell me what seasonally appropriate reads you’re enjoying right now, so that I can check them out too.

The comment section awaits ⤵

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Cover Reveal: Moth to a Flame

My adult books may have taken centre stage in my social media posts lately, not least because I have been mired in line edits and they have been occupying my thoughts, but it’s time to turn out attention back to YA. The third book in my YA assassin trilogy, The Butterfly Assassin, is coming out in May, and today I get to share with you the cover! (And, officially, the title, although you already knew that part.)

So, without further ado, here it is:

The cover of Moth to a Flame by Finn Longman. The cover has a black background, with grey graffiti-style patterns. In the centre is a blue, graffiti-style moth with a pink flame engulfing its left wing. The tagline reads "A city on fire / A killer on the run".

Isn’t it great? I love how strongly it leans into the street art theme: I feel like this genuinely looks like something you could see sprayed on a wall. My group chat are also pleased with how bisexual the colour scheme is. Not that it’s a particularly bi book, although I would say that the casual background queerness of Isabel’s world becomes more apparent in this one and her own efforts to understand (or to lose) herself further illuminate it. It’s a good colour scheme, in any case.

We’ve also broken free of the by day / by night tagline schema that we used for the first two books… a controversial choice, I know, but it’s a very different kind of book, one in which Isabel’s no longer able to maintain the separation of a double life but forced to grapple with everything that’s happened to her, away from the masks and the self-deception that let her ignore it. So we needed a new approach.

Still, I think the three books look pretty cool together:

The covers of all three books in the trilogy side by side. The Butterfly Assassin features a bright blue and yellow butterfly; The Hummingbird Killer a bright red and orange hummingbird, and Moth to a Flame a dark blue and bright pink moth on fire. All have a graffiti effect to them, although it's most pronounced with the third cover.

As for the book itself…

It’s difficult to talk too much about Moth to a Flame without significant spoilers for The Hummingbird Killer, and I know that I have quite a few new blog readers and social media followers who might not have had a chance to pick up the first two books yet. But if The Hummingbird Killer was where I broke everything, Moth to a Flame is where I fix it — or at least, start to put the broken pieces back together.

This book has quite a different tone to the first two. Where The Butterfly Assassin sits comfortably in the YA space with its themes of seeking independence, developing identity outside of your parents’ expectations, balancing school with the rest of your life, and the like, The Hummingbird Killer took us a little further into the crossover zone as Isabel started to live a young adult life, dealing with a day job and a flatmate. Moth to a Flame continues that trajectory, since Isabel is firmly a young adult by this point. At the same time, younger characters (like Sam) allow Isabel a chance to reconnect with a childhood/adolescence she never really got to have, stopping us from slipping all the way into the territory of adult fiction. Still definitely upper YA; I think the official recommendation is 14+, but maybe we might be appealing more to the older readers here.

The mood is a little more introspective and character-focused, compared to the more action-heavy earlier installments, and there’s also considerably less murder. To put that into context: when I tried to keep track of the body count of The Hummingbird Killer, I lost track around 50; by contrast, I think there are 3 murders in Moth to a Flame (or at least, three that have on-page significance/directly impact on our characters, though there are some referenced, off-page deaths). So you can see that’s a bit of a shift.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about this — that the book’s focus on healing, recovery, justice, and breaking cycles of violence would be a disappointment to those looking for a stabby, action-filled thriller. But it was important to me to write it like this, in opposition to my original plans for the book back in 2014-15 (which were just so very depressing). This story is substantially about grappling with harm that can’t be undone and damage that can’t be fixed, and when I say that this is a more hopeful story of healing, I don’t mean to suggest that everything’s going to be all right for everyone. But my original plans for the book were bleak, and I realised I wasn’t interested in telling that story, and that I had to do something different with this one than I’d done with the first two.

I joked on Tumblr that this is the Bucky Barnes Recovery Fic of the series. I have a soft spot for these stories — stories that step outside of the action and breathless plot of canon to focus on the slow process of a traumatised ex-assassin learning how to be a person again, grappling with grief and guilt, trying to make sense of their culpability for the acts they were forced by others to commit. Bucky and Isabel have quite different backstories, and I wouldn’t want to overstate the influence these fics had on me; nevertheless, these are the stories that taught me sometimes the most narratively interesting thing you can do with a character like this is allow them to heal and, through that healing, ask difficult questions about justice and punishment and repairing harm.

And, finally, this is also a book where the underlying themes of the whole series become significantly less subtle. I have always been criticising the military recruitment of teenagers, the arms industry that places profit above lives, and the social and political attitudes that enable these to continue, but this book’s wider geographical scope (no longer limited to the walled city of Espera) means this stops being metaphorical or abstract and starts being overt. Again, this might be an unpopular choice, but there’s no other way I could have written this book that would have felt true to me.

So, basically, this is where it becomes most obvious that this trilogy about assassins was written by a pacifist. Which some people might not like! But, on the other hand, I think in the world we live in right now, there’s a need for stories about grappling with aftermath and recovery — stories where love and found family and cosy scenes with cake don’t exist only in a low-stakes, low-danger environment, but are deliberately built as an act of resistance and a process of recovery. It’s a story about the power of friendship: not the power to prevent violence or harm, necessarily, but to create a life after violence, and rebuild safety from the ground up.

(Once it’s out, I’d love to do a big long thinky post about my epigraph choices for all three books and what they signify for me; the one for Moth to a Flame is very much about friendship in the face of monstrosity and violence.)

Anyway. Those are the vibes of the book. But, truthfully, I am mainly relying on the cliffhanger ending of The Hummingbird Killer to serve as the main pre-order incentive for this one, because if you read that and don’t want to know what happens next, well, I don’t think anything I say is going to change your mind 😅

Just in case, though, here’s a quick graphic showing some of the other things the book contains:

A graphic showing the cover of Moth to a Flame by Finn Longman. Around it are words with arrows pointing to the cover: "unhealthy coping mechanisms", "significantly less murder than books 1 and 2", "murder rehab (aka healing through friendship)", "cake", "revolution", "Leeds?", "gay communist support group", "traumatised ex-assassin learns how to be a person", "grief", "justice", "found family". 23.05.24, pre-order now.

I mean, who could resist that all important trope: “Leeds?”

(Yes, this book is largely set in Leeds. Yes, that’s a spoiler for The Hummingbird Killer. Yes, several of the locations in the book are real. No, none of the people in the book are real. Yes, this is why I went on a research trip to Leeds last year and took a truly disproportionate number of pictures of weird corners of the central library. Now you know!)

I think we’re still tweaking the cover copy and final blurb, but here’s the blurb as it appears on retail sites currently:

Isabel Ryans has fled Espera, leaving behind her identity as teen assassin the Moth. Now she’s trying to adjust to the reality of the outside world. But her grief and trauma are catching up with her, and surrounded by civilians who will never understand what life is like in the walled city, she feels more alone than ever.

When a journalist is murdered nearby, suspicion automatically falls on Isabel. And inside Espera’s walls, the abolitionist movement is gaining strength. When Isabel’s search for the killer leads to an unexpected reunion, she’s forced to decide whether she can really leave the city behind, and what part the Moth might have to play in the uprising.

Is Isabel Ryans the city’s saviour . . . or its scapegoat?

Moth to a Flame will be released on 23rd May, and it’s available to pre-order now.

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27/11, Misio–Ofero–Eskapo–Malespero–Postrikolto (TBA Readalong)

Oh boy. We have five chapters to get through in today’s post – the entire climax of The Butterfly Assassin – so I’m going to have to keep things super businesslike and not get too distracted by my notes/past drafts if I want this post to stay under 10k words. Apologies to those who wanted 10k words, but I am not getting paid for this, and have already written 57k in posts for this readalong, so we gotta keep things manageable.

General content warnings that these chapters are pretty violent; some of the excerpts from drafts include descriptions of violence and some of the discussion will focus on it.

First off, a quick summary of what goes down in these chapters / on this day:

On the 27th of November, Isabel and Michael travel to Isabel’s parents’ secret guild, the ransom in tow. Ian Ryans insists on giving them a tour of his new guild, which he’s named Katipo, after the spider Latrodectus katipo.* While showing them around, Ian reveals that Isabel’s poisoning was not entirely intentional – he intended to use her as a hiding place for his poison, but because she ran away, the pellet wasn’t removed in time before the coating broke down and the poison was released. Isabel is, to put it lightly, not particularly happy about this revelation.

Among other projects, one of the things Ian is doing with Katipo is training children, the one thing that Comma forbid him from doing after Cocoon was shut down. Isabel is horrified to encounter the children, and realises that her own safety is meaningless unless her parents are prevented from hurting anyone else. After the tour, Ian reluctantly allows Isabel to see Emma, and accepts the ransom in exchange for her release – if Isabel will stay. Isabel begs Michael to take Emma to safety, which he does, leaving Isabel trapped with her father, who locks her in the cell where Emma was being held.

Eventually, Isabel manages to break out of the cell, planning to save herself and the children her father was training. On her way out, she runs into Mortimer and Emma: Mortimer, who came looking for her just as she’d asked him to, and Emma, who refused to stay outside and safe and insisted on accompanying him. The three go looking for the children, separating to check different rooms. Emma is then threatened by Michael, who has been loyal to Judith Ryans all along, and by extension Ian. Isabel tries to negotiate with him, and when that fails, to fight him, but Michael kills Emma, and sets the lab alight in the struggle that follows. He flees; Mortimer and Isabel rescue the kids and carry Emma’s body to safety. Comma have attacked Katipo in the meantime and they’re forced to fight their way out. Toni Rolleston is killed. Isabel comes face-to-face with her father one last time, and kills him. Then she leaves his guild for the last time.

So I think it’s safe to say that 27th November isn’t a great day for Isabel.

Where do we start with these scenes? A lot has changed in this section of the book. Katipo didn’t originally exist; the earliest drafts involved Hummingbird. By the fifth draft, the third guild and Ian’s insistence on giving Isabel a tour of it had entered the story, but I hadn’t figured out that he was training children. That came in the sixth draft, once I drilled down into his motivations and figured out what he wanted to do that Comma wouldn’t let him do (at which point it became the obvious direction to take things in).

Introducing the children then meant a lot more of Isabel’s emotional arc was resting on these moments – in order to decide to rescue them, she needs to get past the trauma response that says I survived, why shouldn’t they? and reach the point of saying Nobody should have to go through that. Which is what Emma has been trying to tell her for a long time, but she hasn’t really been able to believe it until she sees those kids and realises exactly how young they are – and by extension, how young she was when she started training.

It also gave Isabel a reason to go back into the building after escaping, which meant there was a lot more going on here. Initially, Emma died much more quickly: Michael killed her on Ian’s orders while they were still in the cell, and Isabel was left with her body. Now, of course, Isabel’s escaped the cell long before any of that goes down, and Emma’s death comes in a moment of direct conflict, rather than being over before Isabel’s even had time to process the betrayal. These changes also meant it was Emma’s choice to be in the building at all: she had escaped, and was outside, and went back for Isabel, putting herself in danger. That made her a more active character, rather than one who was simply kidnapped and then killed, but also made the death more dramatic and emotional.

And Michael – Michael’s exact involvement has changed somewhat. Originally, before I introduced the subplot that he is a sad orphan who was taken in by the Ryans’ and basically functions as a surrogate sibling for Isabel, his mother, Angela, was part of the other guild – Hummingbird, first, and then Katipo once it started to exist. His betrayal was thus a fairly simple one, and he’d only ever been on their side. Now, it’s a lot more complicated, tied up in his own feelings; he’s far more loyal to Judith than to Ian, and has been following conflicting orders throughout, juggling them with some of his own feelings.

Oh, and also, Mortimer used to be Angela’s brother and therefore Michael’s estranged uncle. That was a thing. I cut that after the fifth draft and gave Mortimer a proper backstory and set of motivations that weren’t just your classic “surprise! Everyone’s related!”, but it definitely shaped some of those earlier drafts. I can’t even remember what I was trying to achieve with that, to be honest; although it’s referenced frequently in my notes, I still always forget that it was the case until I see it again in the old drafts.

All in all, then, we turned one chapter into about three and set everything up for Optimum Pain and Bonus Character Development.

Given how much of this part of the book wasn’t in the earlier drafts, let’s focus on the part that was: Emma’s death.

Like Nick, Emma has always died. There has never been a version of this book where she survived. There never could have been, because she is the living embodiment of hope and a symbol of Isabel’s life outside the guild, and Isabel has lost both of those things by the end of this book. Therefore Emma could never have survived: if she had, this would have been a different kind of book, and I was always writing a tragedy.

I did think about it, though. Some of the time in edits, I tried to work out if there was any way I could let her live. But the answer was no, if I wanted the rest of the trilogy to work at all; those who’ve read The Hummingbird Killer will know that many of Isabel’s ongoing choices are shaped by grief and guilt over this death, and without that, I would have had to write a different trilogy.

Let’s look at how it went down in the fifth draft:

She takes the key to the rucksack from her jacket pocket and tosses it to her father, forcing him to pick it up from the filthy floor. “You’ve got your ransom,” she says. “We’re leaving now.”

“But I still have so much to show you.”

“I don’t care.” Isabel tries to help Emma up, but she’s not strong enough. There’s no way she’ll get her back to the hospital like this. “Michael, give me a hand,” she says, and he steps forward and lifts Emma in one easy movement.

She makes a choking noise, and coughs blood.

For a second, Isabel can’t understand what she’s seeing, and then she sees the blade protruding from her friend’s chest, held by Michael as he cradles her like a sleeping child.

“No,” she whispers. “No, Michael, what have you done?”

“Isabel,” says Emma, and closes her eyes, and it’s obvious that she’s dead because you can’t be a killer without recognising death in all its forms. But this is far crueller than any Isabel’s worked and it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense.

In the following chapter, she managed to persuade Michael to open up about his motivations, which is when we got to see his alternate backstory, which has significant knock-on effects on the origins of his relationship with Isabel and their backstory together:

She takes three deep breaths, ignoring the stench of the room, and says, “I don’t understand how Angela can be your mother.”

“Oh, come on,” he says. “You really think someone with my level of training would mess up an assignment that badly by accident? I screwed it up because I needed them to chuck me out.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He sighs. “My mother was Hummingbird. My father was Comma.”

For a second, she wonders whether their relationship was anything like the star-crossed romances Emma was reading, and she wants to turn to her friend and joke about it, and then she remembers that Emma’s dead and won’t ever make jokes about trashy romance novels again. But she still isn’t crying, she notices. Is she going to? Does she know how to do that anymore?

“So…” she says.

“Dad won the argument about which guild would train me, which was fine until he died and I was effectively stranded there. They wouldn’t let me see Mum while I was still part of Comma, so I knew it was time to leave. She helped me plan my way out.”

“People died. I nearly died.”

“Yeah, and I saved you. I didn’t want any more collateral damage and I was counting on you to plead for me so that I didn’t end up dead. It worked. You’re very predictable, you know. You should probably work on that.”

“You did all that so you could leave?”

“You should know they’re not fond of letting people walk away.” He shrugs. “Hummingbird was as much my family as Comma. My sister was there – she’s not an agent, she’s just a kid, but she’s family. And of course, you’ve met my mother. I had no reason to stay, but when Toni persuaded the guild to take me in again, I realised I could play both sides.”

Ah yes, Michael’s sister. I can’t really talk about that plotline without giving non-spoilers for The Hummingbird Killer – which is to say, one of the characters in THK used to be Michael’s sister, and isn’t anymore, but I can’t really give any more details than that without some actual spoilers for things that do happen in the book, so, uh, ask me about that one in DMs if you’ve read THK, I guess.

By the time I was editing the book in 2020, I was trying to rework Emma’s death scene to be more drawn-out and emotional, but I was having some trouble with the exact logistics of lifting somebody up and stabbing them at the same time. I ended up asking one of my housemates (it was lockdown, after all) if she would come and be a body for me, so that I could figure out where everybody’s arms were going, a request she took very well. (I repaid this assistance by dedicating The Hummingbird Killer to my 2019-20 housemates.)

But notwithstanding my efforts to resolve the limb logistics, I ended up changing how it went down entirely, as well as moving the entire encounter to the lab – a chance to force Isabel to face her nightmares and flashbacks by putting her in a location that reminds her of her childhood, adding an extra layer to her suffering in this scene. This also meant it was much easier to subsequently set things on fire, and I made sure to painstakingly research the best way of doing this by going into the STEM channel of the grad student Discord server I was in at the time and asking, “Hey, how would you accidentally set a lab on fire?”

(They gave me a wide range of crucial information, from which chemicals shouldn’t be stored together to how sprinklers and other safety precautions work to the materials used for lab work surfaces to which way doors in labs typically open. I have subsequently forgotten all of it, but anything that needed to be in the book ended up in it, so that’s fine. Thank you, STEM nerds.)

Discord messages from Finn, dated 18/06/2021: hello would any science people be able to help me with writing a Dramatic Scene in this book? i am trying to make Big Fire. the characters are in a chemistry lab (with gas taps etc) and there is at least one gunshot so it feels like this would not be difficult, but i'd love some ideas of the most realistic way to make Chaos, ideally by accident. what are some things that would start fires in this kind of setting? presumably since our school labs didn't automatically go up in flames whenever somebody lit a match, just leaving a gas tap on wouldn't be enough to start a fire? one bullet goes into a person, but there could be a second gunshot, which might hit something important, perhaps? (this scene previously took place outside of a lab, and the fire was deliberately started, so the fact that i've moved it and changed the cause is requiring Thought)

By October 2020, then, this scene had almost achieved its final form – children, Michael, gunshot, fire – except that the fire was set deliberately. This change happened because I realised Michael is too scared of Ian and Judith Ryans to risk pissing them off by damaging their guild on purpose — and, most importantly, he is not actually trying to kill Isabel, since her parents want her alive. Moreover, once I moved this scene to the lab, it made even less sense for him to start the fire on purpose, because the chance of it reaching the gas supply and leaving nothing but a smouldering crater was too high — his self-preservation instincts aren’t the best, but he’s not going to take that kind of risk. But to do it by accident… yes, that worked, that made it his fault while not introducing the gaping plot hole of incoherent motivations.

It turns out, you see, that the answer to, “Why would he do this?” cannot solely be, “Because he’s a melodramatic edgelord,” which was, in fact, the only defence I had to offer for this scene:

“Rule one,” says Michael. “Don’t get attached to someone who can’t look after themselves.”

She looks back at him and her rage sets her alight. She would burn herself alive if there was a chance the blaze would kill him too. She has to force the words out through gritted teeth: “I’ll kill you.”

But when she reaches for a weapon, she finds none.

Michael pushes himself onto his knees, onto his feet, clinging to the wall. His face is still twisted with pain, but he gives her a cruel smile as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small silver lighter.

“Good luck playing the Pied Piper,” he says, and flicks it alight, dropping the flame onto the carpet.

He must have planned this. Must have soaked half the room in alcohol. The fire sheets up instantly, hiding him from view, and she doesn’t have to chase after him to know that he’ll be long gone before she even gets to the door.

So she stays where she is: motionless, Emma’s body in her lap, waiting for this room to become their funeral pyre and burn them into ash the colour of grief.

Funny how actually thinking about your characters’ motivations can make your book better, who knew.

Anyway, all of that brings us to the fight in the lobby, and Isabel trying to get the children out – including one particularly young redhaired girl whom you should definitely remember because she’s going to come up again elsewhere in the trilogy – and Toni Rolleston’s death. As I mentioned a few posts ago, Toni originally died earlier in the story, off-screen, during an attempt to rescue Emma herself. By shifting her death to here, though, I gave her a chance to redeem herself: she risks herself to help save a child who should never have been in guild training, the way she didn’t save Isabel. And she dies. But the girl gets out.

I love mirrors, I love doubles, I love circularity. This whole section of the book is about events coming full circle and cycles of harm being broken or altered: the guild who didn’t help Isabel earlier does come back for her here, the people who failed her try to help her, Isabel tries to break the cycle for the next generation so that they don’t have to suffer the way she did. Things change in this moment, and that temporary break in the violent cycles that have trapped Isabel up to this point set her up for the next misbelief that’s going to cause her trouble: there is safety in the guild. (Because as we’ll see in The Hummingbird Killer, there is not.)

And, as such, this also needed to be the moment when Isabel came face-to-face with her father again. First she shoots him in the kneecap, and then she kills him.

She didn’t always kill him. As late as the fifth draft, she couldn’t bring herself to do it; even in the notes I wrote during Author Mentor Match, the climax of the ‘revenge tragedy’ elements of the book were only achieved by proxy:

Michael is a foil for Isabel, but to her, he represents her father. She fails to kill her father when she has the chance, but she does kill Michael. It’s the conclusion of that previous confrontation, but only by proxy, as Isabel can never be truly free of her father – only of versions of him. BAM, LITERARY SYMBOLISM. Put THAT in your essay and analyse it.

So the end of the road isn’t Isabel failing to kill her father, it’s Isabel killing Michael, who is

  • a foil for herself, under her father’s control, and therefore symbolic of her breaking out of that, and
  • a double for her father, whom she couldn’t bring herself to kill when she had the chance, and therefore a symbol of how she’ll never be truly free of him but can rid herself of his proxies, and
  • the mechanism through which Isabel’s final symbol of safety (Emma) was lost, making revenge her only (empty) way of responding to that.

By the sixth draft, though, I’d realised that proxies weren’t enough, and I needed to permanently take Ian Ryans out of the picture, and let Isabel be the one to do it.

I deliberated hard before changing this, because I don’t believe in revenge, and I don’t think you break a cycle of violence with more violence. I didn’t want to seem like I was endorsing it as a way of solving problems – a lot of the time, it just makes more of them. But I understand Isabel’s logic here: she knows as well as anyone else does that killing Ian won’t undo anything that’s been done to her, but having just rescued those other children from him, knows that to prevent this cycle from perpetuation, she needs to remove him from the picture. And, well, she’s not wrong, exactly, because she’s trapped in a system where there is no other justice and no other safety.

I think Isabel wants some other form of justice. She doesn’t want the responsibility for ending this: she wants her parents to be held accountable by a third party, and forced to make amends. But she knows it won’t happen, because Ronan told her as much. And she is not at the point in her character arc where she can prioritise her own desire not to be judge, jury and executioner over the fact that if she doesn’t do this, nothing will change and nobody will be saved. Killing her father means being what her father made her, but it’s the only way to stop him doing the same to others.

By changing this, then, I wasn’t endorsing this action as the right thing to do – I really don’t think there is a right thing to do in Isabel’s position – but acknowledging that given Isabel’s current state of mind and her other options for justice, it didn’t feel realistic that she would ever have done anything else. For starters, she would need to value herself and see herself as something other than a killer to take any action that doesn’t involve, well, killing someone. And she’s a long way off reaching that point.

That’s not to say the versions of this book where Isabel didn’t kill him involved leaving Ian unharmed. From the fifth draft:

“You should have kept your mouth shut,” she tells him again, and fires a single shot at his leg.

It hits him in the kneecap, and he screams, and Isabel turns and walks towards that square of daylight. Her father calls out, triumphant despite his gasps of pain: “I knew you wouldn’t kill me.”

Isabel looks back, smiles, and fires a second shot into the other leg. “Death’s too good for you, father dearest,” she says. “But you’ll rot in hell soon enough.”

He’s still screaming as she drops the gun on the bloodstained floor and walks out into the bright winter air.

(One of these days I will publish a book where nobody gets kneecapped. But both The Butterfly Assassin and The Hummingbird Killer contain Graphic Violence Against Kneecaps, so apparently it is not this day. I don’t know if this is a sign of some deep-rooted psychological issue about knees, or if it’s simply a very practical place to shoot somebody if you don’t want them to run away but also don’t plan for them to die immediately, but it sure is a thing I keep writing about, for some reason.)  

All in all, the climax of this book offers us a pyrrhic victory. Isabel achieves her initial goal of escaping her parents’ control – but only at the cost of Emma, and only by ending up back in the hands of the guild. She’s permanently eliminated the threat posed by her father, but only by becoming the person he spent years moulding her into. She may have helped the children escape, but we’ll see as the trilogy continues that there’s a lot more to do before the systems that traumatised her are actually changed for good. And while Katipo has been destroyed, the damage it’s done – including to Isabel herself – can’t be undone.

And all the while, Michael is still in the wind, and Judith is nowhere to be seen…

Reviewers seem quite torn on this climax. This partly depends whether they’re here to cry or whether they actually wanted Isabel to succeed at living a normal life with a normal friend – some people are furious that I killed Emma, and not in a complimentary “I hate you for making me feel things” way, but in the “This isn’t the story I thought I was signing up for” way. That’s fine; you can’t please everyone. I always knew what story I was telling, and it always led us here.

I think reactions also vary depending on how people felt about Michael. One of the things that changed a lot in the late drafts is how much effort I put into making him seem sympathetic and building a rapport between him and Isabel, even if it’s a rapport largely based on shared traumatic backstory. In earlier drafts, there was less of that going on, so his betrayal didn’t hit nearly as hard.

At the same time, I’ve been foreshadowing it all along – for example, Isabel mistaking Michael for her father when she’s lost in a flashback at Grace’s lab, because he’s functioning as Ian-by-proxy all along. And he’s Isabel’s double, but just as Emma is the double who was never taken by Comma in the first place, Michael is the double who never got out. If his betrayal wasn’t a surprise to you, that’s fine; it means you caught the clues I was seeding in. I never intended it to rest solely on a “surprise! Plot twist!” setup, but to work equally well as a “I know something the protagonist doesn’t and I can’t stop her from making bad choices” kind of plotline. (I’m a chronic re-reader, so I like books to work even when you know where they’re going.) But at the same time, I think there are layers to it that hit harder when they’re a shock.

Still, it’s divisive, and not just because some readers didn’t realise this was the start of a trilogy and didn’t realise I would be making things worse rather than wrapping them up. So I’m curious how you all felt about it, and about any other thoughts you have on these chapters. I feel I had to rush through them quite quickly, since so much happens in one day (this post is already over 4k long, so imagine how bad it would’ve been if I hadn’t tried so hard to restrain myself); I’ve inevitably missed some really interesting detail that I’ll be sad not to have discussed. Which means it’s your job to spot those details, and ask me about them!

We have just two posts left in this readalong series, each covering half of chapter 38. And then we’ll be done, and I will finally be able to blog about something else. I will miss it, and I will also be deeply relieved. Perhaps youse feel the same…

*Sidenote: this spider takes its scientific Latin name from a Māori term for the spider, katipō. According to Wikipedia, this name derives from the Māori words “kakati” (to sting) and “pō” (night), thus meaning night-stinger, due to a belief that the spider bites at night. This would be an interesting symbolic counterpoint to Isabel as the Moth, if it were intentional. As a matter of fact, I was entirely unfamiliar with the Māori roots of the name, having encountered it via a more general discussion of the Latrodectus family and taken the Latin name without exploring its etymology. I certainly had no intention of co-opting an Indigenous term to use for an evil organisation, though I may inadvertently have done so. I realised once this was pointed out that my choice of name may be hurtful, belonging as it does to a wider trend of white authors treating Indigenous and minoritised languages as fodder for fantasy without considering the impact on speakers of those languages. I hope that the Latinised spelling of the name makes it clear that I was drawing from the scientific term, but I apologise for my lack of further research here. Within the universe of the book, I can only attribute the use of this name to Ian Ryans being exactly the sort of person to co-opt whatever terminology he wanted for whatever purposes he wanted to use it for, with absolutely no regard for the impact of his actions on anybody at all, because he is a prick.

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24/11, Infano (TBA Readalong)

We’re picking up speed again with our readalong of The Butterfly Assassin – you can expect daily posts for the next week or so as we accelerate towards the end of the book. (Which I had not totally remembered was the case and I have not written them, so imagine me hastily writing posts like that one Wallace & Gromit gif of laying train tracks frantically as you zoom along.)

I feel like I need to put some content warnings on this post. While it won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read this chapter that we’re going to be talking about the deaths of teenagers, there are some details from past drafts that are considerably more gruesome and dramatic than what actually ended up in the book, so, fair warning, we’re talking about organ harvesting, sorry.

Today is the 24th of November, and on this day in 2029, Isabel Ryans kills two people: her sixteen-year-old target, Oliver Roe, and her classmate, Nick Larrington, who saw her with the body. No hesitation, no mercy, no witnesses. There was, arguably, a moment of hesitation, if we’re feeling charitable towards Isabel. But there was no space for mercy, and by the end of the chapter, there were no witnesses.

Isabel has always killed Nick – there has never been a version of the book where he survived – but I have to say, there were some drafts where the circumstances of that were considerably more unhinged. Notably, the second draft, in which she. Uh. Harvested his organs?

“I have to.”

“No, Isabel, you don’t. Whatever twisted ideas the guilds have put in your head, this is not your only choice!”

Isabel moves quickly, pinning him against the wall. He’s still shaking, looks like he’s about to throw up. “You don’t know anything about my choices,” she says.

“I know that killing me doesn’t have to be one of them,” he says. “If you’d told me I was a donor match I probably would have given you one of my kidneys anyway.”

“Fuck off.”

“I would. If it would have helped, I would have done it. But this… this isn’t the way to solve anything.” He breaks off. “You’re crying.”

“I’m dying,” she says. “I’m dying and they won’t help me if I’m not one of them. I have to – I have to be loyal. And you’ve been on their radar for a while now. It’s only chance that makes this any more than a stupid pointless death like all the other stupid pointless deaths in this city. You would have told someone. Next week. Next month. A year. You would have opened your mouth and Comma would have killed you.”

Look. Sometimes when I tell people that I completely rewrote this book from the ground up, they’re like, “Oh, I could never do that, I don’t like the idea of an editor making me change my book.” And leaving aside the fact that the most drastic changes in this book have all been ones I decided to make rather than being an editor’s recommendation… sometimes, the book is bad. Sometimes, the book involves your supposedly sympathetic viewpoint character harvesting her classmate’s organs.

Sometimes, yeeting a plot point is for the best.

Isabel required organ transplants right up until the fifth draft, if I remember rightly, at which point I decided it screwed the pacing too much to put her in recovery for that long, but poor Nick was no longer the unwilling donor after the second draft. Since the third draft, his death has been much the same as the final version: after Isabel kills her mark at the nightclub, she kills Nick to eliminate a witness. Some of the details have changed, but the basic scene has been the same.

Poor Nick. He really did only ever try to be Isabel’s friend. Sometimes, I think Nick’s the character I relate to most in this book – especially the reference in the early chapters to the fact that he sometimes cries while reading the news. I do the same. I’ve been doing that a lot recently, and you’d think with the constant barrage of atrocities, I’d get desensitised to it, but I don’t. I’m still haunted by it. I never want to be the kind of person who isn’t, if I’m honest, but I don’t think I’d survive in a city like Espera.

One thing I did rediscover when I was looking at the second draft was this little worldbuilding detail:

“Let’s go. Before anyone comes to see why the shot was fired.”

They’ll have given it the Esperan Fifteen – quarter of an hour to let whatever agents still in the area get out of there before you go and investigate. Give it less than that and you might find your own body joining the weekly murder figures. Could take a lot longer for anyone to come, if there’s nobody nearby, but it’s best not to push it.

The idea of the “Esperan Fifteen” makes sense, in a city like this – when you know assassins are operating in your vicinity, you’re not going to go running towards a gunshot to find out what happened, because 99% of the time, you already know what happened, and the only thing you’ll achieve if you do is end up a witness, and therefore dead. But at some point I stopped explicitly spelling that out in the book, and the phrase was lost; I’d forgotten about it until now.

And then there’s Oliver.

Until the sixth draft, Oliver didn’t have a name. He ended up being Oliver because nearly everybody in one of my writing group chats at the time had an Oliver in their books, often one who died, and it became, briefly, an in-joke, so when I realised he didn’t have a name, I gave it to him. It was important to me, that he should have a name in the end. That he should be a person.

Isabel does not know why Oliver is on the guilds’ hit list. She doesn’t know why somebody paid to eliminate a sixteen-year-old. She knows that the money was good, because Ronan told her; good enough that the guild didn’t turn the job down. And that’s the only information she has.

But I know.

Oliver’s backstory is traumatic in a way that I didn’t feel could be sensitively or meaningfully explored in this book, and therefore it cannot be on the page, or anywhere in the trilogy. He deserves more than a passing note, and there’s no space to give him one. Suffice to say that he was innocent, and killed to cover up the wrongdoings of others, and because those others were adults and they were rich and they were powerful, and he was young and poor, they were able to click their fingers and have the guild come running.

Ronan knew. Isabel didn’t. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference if she did, because she didn’t feel like she had any choice, either way. And there’s no good reason to kill a sixteen-year-old (or, indeed, anyone), so it’s not like she wouldn’t suspect that it was this kind of situation.

Oliver’s death is the first premeditated murder that Isabel commits in this book, and we’re 300 pages into it. We might expect it to be more difficult than it seems to be, but then we’d be forgetting who Isabel is, the upbringing she’s had. And I think it’s hard, as people who don’t live in Espera, to fully grasp the impact of living in a city where the guilds and their actions are so normalised, to the point where dying at the hands of the guilds is practically more common than dying of natural causes.

Still: It should be harder than this, to live with herself.

It’s harder in this draft than it was in earlier ones; that’s about as much as I can say about that, and that’s less because I was deliberately writing Isabel as colder-hearted in early drafts than because in general, emotions weren’t effectively layered into the book until much later than they should have been.

One difference, though, is that at the end of this chapter, Isabel imagines the judgment of the world, crying out in horror that the guilds would kill a teenager – just a child. And Isabel thinks, So was I.

But in the earlier drafts, like the third draft, it wasn’t faceless judgement from the media and the newspaper that Isabel feared – it was judgment from an imaginary version of Mortimer.

She’s sitting in Mortimer’s workshop. “What if the guilds killed children, too?” she asks him, and his expression is horrified. Her fingers twist around each other. She’s afraid.

“I’d protect them,” he says. “And I’d hunt down the bastards who did it.”

The dream merges, and she’s running from someone, being chased through a forest of city skyscrapers flickering with the LED lights of technological stars. It doesn’t take long for her dream self to realise that it’s Mortimer who is chasing her, hunting her down.

He pins her to the ground, one of the woodwork knives in his hand. “You killed children,” he says to her. “That boy was just a child.”

But he’s fading to blackness along with her surroundings, the dream melting away with her answer still on her lips: “So was I.”

The first part of this scene is a memory, a scene that happened early on in the third draft and was since cut. Mortimer’s protective instincts have been present from an early stage in the book’s development, but his abolitionist values less so. The rest is her imagination, and even the third draft’s Mortimer wouldn’t actually have tried to hurt her.

But I thought it was interesting, that her subconscious focused on him as the source of judgment. I’m not sure when I changed that, but it was striking to rediscover.

Anyway. Bit of a bleak chapter. Bit of a dark moment for Isabel – and the worst part is, it’s barely even a turning point in her arc, because the turning point was the decision, not acting on it. Tomorrow, we’ll see Isabel exploring some of the emotional consequences and the aftermath of this act, but for now, I want to know what you think.

Did this chapter change how you saw Isabel? Did you think her friendship with Nick would end like this? Does his death seem worse than Oliver’s, or does the personal connection make no difference?

Drop your answers, or any other thoughts on this chapter, in the comments, and I’ll see you back here soon.

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20/11, Konsento (TBA Readalong)

Hello, dear friends and readers. Today is the 20th of November, and I’m back with another post in our readalong of The Butterfly Assassin. I’m curious as to how many of you are still reading – I have one very dedicated commenter, but I suspect/hope there are more of you lurking – and for those who’ve checked out, I’d be interested to know. Is it that the readalong format doesn’t work for you in general, or is it more about this particular book at this specific time?

Because if it’s the latter, I sympathise. I really do. There have been many times when I’ve struggled to write Isabel at her worst and maintain sympathy for her amidst a world that makes those actions no longer hypothetical. The current situation in Gaza makes it hard to find entertainment in children under threat and teenagers in desperate situations just trying to survive, and I wouldn’t blame anyone who seeks distraction in kinder stories.

But this has been the case since I first wrote the book in 2014: it has always echoed and mirrored the worst things on the news, because it has always been drawn from them. Espera is fictional, but the UK arms industry isn’t. The guilds are fictional, but the military recruitment of teenagers isn’t. These characters are fictional, but thousands – millions – of people worldwide have been deemed by governments to be less important than profit and politics, weapons and war, and they have suffered because of it.

So yes, I struggle sometimes to look at Isabel’s hardest decisions and most unforgiveable actions and offer lighthearted commentary as though they are ‘only’ fiction. They’ve never been only fiction. But that’s why stories matter.

And today’s post deals, in a preliminary way, with one of those hard decisions and unforgiveable actions, because on the 20th of November, Ronan comes to visit Isabel, and gives her a job. A target. A mark to eliminate.

A sixteen-year-old boy.

And Isabel takes it, because she’s trapped in a corner with her back against the wall and she told him, I’ll do anything, so now she’s got to. If it’s going to happen anyway, resisting will only cause her more pain; being forced won’t save anyone, and will make it suck for her, so why not agree?

This is a knife you’re using on yourself, says Daragh, and he’s probably right, but there’s a kind of agency in seeing the bad thing coming and taking control over it yourself, rather than waiting for it to become inevitable and unavoidable in somebody else’s hands. Crucially, too, this chapter underlines the difference between Daragh and Isabel. He thinks that she still has choices, other ways to work for the guild; Isabel thinks there is no way of working for the guild that wouldn’t make her complicit in their actions, so she might as well be the worst of them.

I’m not saying that Isabel is wrong about the former – I think being part of the ‘blood-soaked machinery of Comma’, as she puts it, does always come with some complicity about the guild’s actions, because every role within the organisation is geared towards enabling those ends. But that doesn’t mean she’s right about the latter. If her goal was really to do as little harm as possible, then there would be ways of doing that, ways to take the path of least damage. She could, like Daragh, work in the medical division, and save lives rather than take them.

But Isabel isn’t thinking about net harm; she’s thinking about being able to live with herself. And on that level, she sees no difference. Guild is guild is guild. A knife feels like honesty when violence is the only truth you’ve ever been offered.

And Isabel is so stubbornly determined to let others think the worst of her. Here, she doesn’t even want Daragh’s sympathy, because she doesn’t believe she deserves it – she’s certainly not going to beg for it, or make excuses for herself. She’s embracing her villain status, because she feels it’s inevitable and because she doesn’t believe she deserves to be anything else.

Daragh sees through that, defuses it with a mention of Emma, and then:

You’re allowed to be loved, Isabel. You know that, don’t you?

These are the moments that mean everything and are, simultaneously, the hardest to hold as true at times when the world is particularly cruel, the times when I don’t want to hold any love in my heart for people who would kill children regardless of their trauma or lack of agency. I don’t want to love them, because love feels like forgiveness, and I have no right to forgive those people. I am not the one harmed by them.

Forgiveness, though. It’s not the be all and end all of everything, is it? Redemption and forgiveness aren’t the same thing; second chances and forgiveness aren’t the same thing; peace and forgiveness aren’t the same thing; love and forgiveness aren’t the same thing.

Love, in moments like this, is about recognising humanity. You, too, are a human being, and we are bound to each other, and we owe each other safety, and your life is connected to mine. It’s not a softness – it’s an act of recognition that comes with obligations. No, that word’s too negative. Responsibilities, maybe. A shared contract of humanity, the question of what we owe to each other. Isabel has spent so much of her life not being loved; it’s unsurprising that she’s unpractised at doing it in return. It’s uncomfortable to receive it, too: she would rather hide from it.

This plot point has long existed in some form, but this chapter has changed considerably over the years. It was a very late addition for Ronan to hold Isabel’s poison over her head as a bargaining chip, but that, I think, added a layer to the impossibility of her decision, since no matter what she chooses, she is being used to harm others.

In earlier drafts, almost all the emotional complexity was absent; as late as the fifth draft, Isabel agreed readily to the job, simply for the chance to leave the hospital, with no hesitation. It should be obvious why I changed that – while likeable is a boring criterion for a protagonist, I still wanted readers to be able to sympathise.

What I found really interesting looking back at the old drafts is that usually Ronan is the one who gives this file to Isabel, but in the October 2020 draft – the version that went on sub, and sold to Simon & Schuster – she chooses it. We don’t see that moment happen. The first half of the chapter is exploring a lot of the same emotions as this one, with Daragh challenging Isabel on her decision to go back into the field as a kind of self-destructive defence mechanism, but Isabel has sought out Ronan and asked him for a job that will then enable her to leave the hospital, because she thinks that’s the only way she can protect Emma from the city’s dangers.

“Being physically fit enough to kill isn’t the same as being ready to go back in the field.” Ronan regards her. “Daragh doesn’t think you’d pass a psych assessment.”

“He’s wrong.”

“He’s your doctor.”

“Yeah, not my psychologist. Did he tell you not to sign off on this?”

“He expressed concerns.”

Of course Daragh would never actually stop her. He’s too concerned about her autonomy for that. If Isabel wants to self-flagellate, he’ll let her, but he’ll do everything he can to stop her getting her hands on the whip in the first place. Sometimes, it’s admirable. Right now, it’s pissing her off.

“You want me in the field,” says Isabel. “I want me in the field. There shouldn’t be any conflict here.”

Ronan watches her for a moment more, then sighs deeply. “All right.”

Somehow it doesn’t feel like a victory. “You mean it?”

“One assignment,” he says. “You fuck it up, or it fucks you up, and you’re out until Daragh says otherwise. We’ll discuss your housing situation afterwards.”

He agreed. He’s going to let her leave. “I won’t fuck it up,” she promises.

“I’d hope not.” He doesn’t believe her, but he’s not arguing, and that’s a gift horse she’s not about to look in the mouth. She turns to leave, and is almost to the door when Ronan speaks again. “Isabel?” he says. “For your sake, pick an easy one.”

Crucially, in this draft we don’t know anything about the mark until we meet him. We don’t see Isabel choose the file, we don’t know whether his age gives her pause, we don’t question why the guild would be targeting a teenager. We only know that Ronan told her to choose, and she did.

This Isabel is a more active participant in this act of violence. Does that make her a more culpable one? Our Isabel still chose, still agreed, even if her options were narrower and her decision more directly coerced; some would argue there’s no difference, when the end result is the same. I think there is a difference; if I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t have changed it.

But. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking, as I write this chapter, about the way both of these chapters have Isabel accepting her own unlovability, and Daragh saying: you’re allowed to be loved. You know that, don’t you? Except in the published book, it comes after she’s made this decision, after she’s accepted the worst version of herself because she thinks it’s the only viable way forward. And in the 2020 draft, it comes before she’s made this decision, but it doesn’t stop her from making it.

I’m not going to go any further with analysing that; I’d rather leave it open for you to think about how that change affects how you read Isabel in this moment. Do you sympathise with Isabel in the published book, when she takes that file from Ronan? Would you still sympathise with an Isabel who wasn’t handed that file but chose it for herself, out of all the jobs Comma could be doing in the city that week?

Does it matter, in the end, who dies, if somebody is going to? And does it matter who killed them, if the whole system enabled it, and everybody within that system is partly responsible for perpetuating it?

What does this culpability mean for us, now, in the systems we live in, and knowing the violence those systems enable?

I don’t have the answers. I wrote this trilogy because I didn’t, and I needed a way of thinking about them. But sometimes thinking with fiction is more bearable than thinking with reality, so it’s important that we do it, and use that understanding in the real world.

I’ll see you in a couple of days for a phone call with Emma, and one of my favourite lines in the book.

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05/11, Elektoj (TBA Readalong)

Hello friends! I am back with another post in the TBA readalong series, but first, a couple of pieces of news:

  1. The Butterfly Assassin was the winner of the Young Adult category at the Sheffield Children’s Book Awards on Friday! Yay!
  2. The Hummingbird Killer is now available in French, and the French translation of The Butterfly Assassin has been released in a smaller ‘poche’ edition, so it can be more affordable for French readers now. Also yay!

Now on with the story…

On the fifth of November, Isabel Ryans has visitors.

Two of them, to be precise: first Ronan Atwood, and then Michael. (With a brief Daragh interlude in between, but he is more or less the only constant in Isabel’s life, and so not a visitor.)

Ronan asks Isabel to work in her father’s lab. Isabel refuses and insists that the poison she created is destroyed – not being her father’s work, it doesn’t automatically belong to the guild. Whether or not that argument convinces Ronan, he agrees, because it puts Isabel even further into his debt, and makes it very easy to ask her to go back into the field. To become a contract killer.

This is a scene that went through some considerable changes over the years. Isabel’s decision to kill for Comma needed to be a difficult one: we needed to feel her internal conflict. Over time, as the plot shifted and the order of events changed, her reasons varied; in many of the early drafts, she killed to earn money for a ransom, although the exact nature of the need for that went through a few variations.

But in many of the early drafts, Isabel agreed a little too easily to do the very thing she’s spent the entire book trying to avoid up until this point, and I knew I needed to trap her between a rock and a hard place for that decision to feel both sympathetic and narratively satisfying. If she agreed too easily it ran the risk of a) making Isabel seem like a cold-blooded killer, which might put people off, or b) making it seem like she never actually tried to leave the guild.

Since she wasn’t always responsible for the poison, that element of Ronan’s negotiation was a late addition. What is Isabel afraid of? Becoming her father. How can he use that against her?

Ronan is very good at this kind of thing. It’s one of his talents: finding people’s vulnerabilities, and exploiting them, often subtly enough that they don’t realise they’re being manipulated until the last minute. Whether he ever thought Isabel would say yes to working in the lab, I can’t be sure; I suspect he expected her to refuse, but didn’t necessarily anticipate her reasoning. Isabel certainly thinks she’s thrown him off balance, but it’s always hard to tell whether Ronan’s actually surprised, or merely pretending to be because he thinks it’ll be tactically useful in a negotiation.

In the sixth draft, when he first offered her this choice between lab and field work, we see a slightly softer Ronan:

“Not that,” she says. “Bribe me with the world, threaten everything I care about, I don’t care. I’m not going back in the lab.”

Ronan is silent, and then he says, “Okay.”

“I won’t… I won’t be like my father.” That doesn’t quite put words to her fear. She tries again: “I’m not my father.” That comes closer. “I refuse to be my father.”

“Okay.”

It’s suspicious, the way he abandons argument. “But you wanted…”

“I wanted to fill the gap he left behind. I see now I was wrong to think I could use you to do that.”

It’s not an apology; she doesn’t think she’ll ever hear Ronan Atwood say that he’s sorry. And she knows, too, that this doesn’t free her of her obligations and the deal she made.

“So you want me back in the field,” she says. This was always what he wanted, she suspects. That’s why he’s not arguing; he always knew she’d say no. Offered the lab option first in case it looked like a concession, so that he could drag her in with this one.

“Not yet. You’re not strong enough.” But he doesn’t deny it.

Here in the final version, though, it’s all tactics, all negotiation, less personal. And we have that line I rescued from an earlier chapter: Ronan’s eyes are lazy pools of brackish water as they rake over her. Why was that piece of description so important to keep? I don’t know. But I kept it.

This is a pivotal moment – Isabel negotiates her own return to the field, trapping herself further within the guild. It’s also fairly tense, which is why I followed it up directly with Daragh and one of my favourite moments in the book. Namely, the revelation that Ronan owns a very small, very cute cat called Rory.

Rory is named after my mentor, Rory Power, who used to have a dog called Finn. In appearance, Rory the cat is modelled loosely on my sister’s cat Tyler, who is a small fluffy vampire with cat anxiety who likes to lick the shower tray and hide under things. Behold, a beast:

A long-haired black cat with a white patch on his chest lying upside down on a blanket with his paws curled up. He has protruding fangs, like a little vampire, and yellow eyes. He is looking directly at the camera.

The idea of Ronan wearing jeans and occasionally relaxing enough to laugh and hang out with his pet, however, has no direct model. But it’s important to me to emphasise that Ronan, despite his many, many moral flaws, is a human being. A human being capable of doing or enabling a very large amount of evil. And also a human being capable of being very kind to a small animal – one he rescued from a gutter in October 2028, if the rough beginnings of an unfinished short story I have on my hard drive are to be believed.

Ronan Atwood is not a cat person.

He’s not a dog person, either; to listen to his cousin, you would be forgiven for assuming he’s generally just not much of a person. Daragh is probably joking, but Ronan vaguely resents it regardless, in the secret way that he resents things without allowing a glimpse of the emotion to show on his face. He knows the truth of his own personhood, locked very tightly behind the mask that allows him to be extremely good at his job and extremely hard to catch in a moment of weakness. If others can’t see it, it’s because they’re not supposed to.

He had thought his cousin knew him better than that, though. But if he can fool even Daragh… well, that’s almost a victory. Albeit one that’s more painful than he would have anticipated.

He is, however, specifically not a cat person, even if he is a person, which is why he is at a loss for what to do with the small, pathetic bundle of black fur he just fished out of the blocked drain a few yards from his front door. It manages a squeak, reassuring him that it is in fact alive, and tries to crawl inside his jacket. He momentarily resists, fearful for the state of his shirt, before he realises that the damage has already been done and gives in. The kitten, delighted by the warmth, wiggles inside, where it achieves its goal of making him damp.

He’s not sure what to do now.

This short story reveals many things about Ronan, including that this happened in October 2028, just under a year before The Butterfly Assassin begins, while he was still dealing with the cleanup after Cocoon was shut down. We learn several things about Ronan’s perspective on Isabel and Michael that we do not learn in the trilogy. One day I will finish this story and it will give us all several emotions.

In the meantime, however, back to the book, and to Rory. Rory the cat is the only unproblematic character in this entire trilogy, frankly, and she has a devoted fan club. I think there has been more fan art of her than of anyone else (i.e. three whole pieces of art). It’s what she deserves.

And finally, this chapter brings us Michael. This reunion brings a range of emotions. Michael understands Isabel, in a way that few people do; they have an easy humour together, the sarcasm of a shared past. But he’s also angry with her. Angry that she’s relying on Comma rather than hunting down her parents – and is he wrong, that Comma isn’t a safe place to rest? Of course not. It never has been. But it’s safer for Isabel than for him, because they want her, and he’s expendable. We see here that Michael is painfully aware of this fact, because he’s faced that threat before.

(That short story about Ronan tells us:

Ronan had very quietly voted against the motion to have the boy executed – a waste of money, really, after everything that was spent on training those children, and a PR problem waiting to happen if word ever got out. He is unafraid of anybody assuming it was sentiment, since nobody has ever assumed Ronan Atwood does anything out of sentiment. But he sometimes wonders whether he did the right thing, letting the Ryans’ take Michael in.

Is this canon? No. Not yet. Not exactly. But maybe it’s true, regardless.)

And Michael doesn’t let sentiment stop him from being honest with Isabel when he thinks she needs it – for example, accusing her of turning into her mother. It’s surprising that he uses this as an insult, a weapon against her, when we know from their earlier conversations that Michael was always closer to Judith than to Ian, but he knows it’ll work on Isabel, and it does.

All of this is a late addition – of course it is, most of Michael’s characterisation didn’t show up until the sixth draft. In that draft, we had a couple of visits from Michael here, less tense than this one, and a Meaningful Card Game or two. I was into the Meaningful Card Games at that point – attributing significance to different cards, that sort of thing. I used to play a lot of clock solitaire when I was stressed, a trait I gave to Isabel, and I think some of my unconscious associations with certain cards fed into the way I wrote it, too.

“Screw you.” He had the king of clubs all this time. Isabel stares at his winning hand for a moment more. The sneaky bastard. She wants to say that he cheated, but she has no proof, and he always was annoyingly good at this game.

The king of clubs. Ian Ryans. She remembers turning that card repeatedly in her nocturnal games of clock solitaire, so reliably she could almost predict the exact order. Diamonds, hearts, clubs, spades. There was always that spade near the end, right when she thought she’d won. She tries not to read too much into it; she knows what Michael would say if she told him: “You’re too clever to be so superstitious, Isabel.” And he’s not wrong. She knows it’s chance, probability, and her own subconscious that sees meaning in the cards. If the nine of hearts seems to recur, it must be because it’s a little bent, easily picked up, not because it means anything. And as for the king of clubs…

“Isabel?” says Michael, and she realises she’s staring at the cards, unmoving.

She shakes herself out of it. “Sorry. I just got … lost, for a minute.”

There’s a bunch of symbolism in there, but for the most part they were not useful words, and got yeeted in an attempt to fix the book’s pacing. No more clock solitaire, and significantly more tension between Isabel and Michael at this point in the book.

I think that change is for the better, but maybe you disagree. Or maybe you have strong opinions about Rory the cat, or about Ronan’s negotiating tactics, or about the choice Isabel makes in this chapter. Did she do the right thing, do you think, prioritising destroying her poison and her capacity to become her father over her only chance of not ending up in the field?

You’ve got a good couple of weeks to answer these questions (“Isabel spends the next two weeks in the training gym”, begins chapter 28), and who knows, maybe I’ll even post about something else at some point in that window. (Or not. Which is, I fear, more likely.) I look forward to hearing your thoughts!