Without mentioning any details of the actual story, I have something to say about the latest episode in writing my novel. It's really confusing.

Total length is just over 110,000 words, now. The current section is about 40,000 words of confusing stuff. Without my quite realizing it, the plot in this section has somehow turned into a dense composite of deceptions. It's bad enough that there are three different characters within the story who are currently all trying to deceive each other. What makes it absolute hell is that I, as the author, am trying to deceive the reader about all three of them, so that the reader will think they are following every character's cunning plan, but then be shocked and amazed at what actually happens. So the number of cunning plans has just multiplied out of control.

Each of the three characters has a real plan, with a shocking denouement — I mean, something totally over the top. A gruesome villain will turn out to have deceived the world about her race, sex, sanity and loyalty. A character who has seemed to be dying of fever will fake her own death by burning at the stake, and send a large fortress over an immense waterfall with an ANFO bomb. And an apparently effete wimp will turn out to be a four-armed mutant killing machine, go on a rampage with an enormous broadsword made of depleted uranium, and then fly away with a huge pair of artificial wings. Seriously, you couldn't make this stuff up. Well, apparently I could. But it's pretty insane.

So my first task was already hard: find some way to make all of those insane things realistically possible. Amazing as it seems, I think I've done that. These bizarre denouements are not things I'm trying to awkwardly work into another story; they are the story. I can bend the entire universe around them, to make them work. I have. And I think I have done a fair job of covering my tracks, too, in that the things I have written into the world and the previous chapters, in order to justify these crazy things, seem to me to fit smoothly into the rest of the story. They resonate with other parts of the world and the story, well enough that I don't think they stick out as arbitrary elements that have obviously been added just to make something else happen. Given how bizarre the stuff that ends up happening is, this is not trivial; but I've worked hard for quite some time, and taken forty or fifty thousand words to lay it all out.

The next layer of difficulty was that each of these plans is a deception, aimed by each of the three characters at the other two. So each of them involves a cover story. These are all very intelligent people, and they know that about each other. Their efforts to deceive each other have to be realistically effective. Having laboriously made all these outrageous things possible in the world, I have to conceal them with cover stories that can deceive two smart characters. Again I think I have managed this, though. The three characters are all clever and resourceful, but there are a lot of things they don't know about each other — and of course what they know is entirely up to me. So I believe I have made it completely plausible that each of these characters would be attempting to deceive the others in the ways that they do. The ones that should be deceived are believably deceived, and the ones that see through the deceptions do so believably as well.

Only recently, however, did I realize that this still wasn't enough. There's a third layer to the challenge, as well.

The reader will know more than any of the characters. In particular, one of the characters is the narrator of this section, and one was the narrator of the longer section before it. Neither narrator has any reason to deceive their readers deliberately. And anyway, these two are the main protagonists. They have to remain reasonably sympathetic and credible, so the reader has to reliably know quite a lot. This means that the reader is unlikely to believe that the one character is really dying of fever — it has already been mentioned that her people have turbo-charged immune systems — or that the other is such a coward. The reader will have serious doubts, at the least, about two of the three cover stories. And if the reader starts looking around at all, at what else might possibly be going on instead, all my efforts to make the crazy denouements possible will probably be too obvious. I think I managed to stop them from sticking out as totally weird, but if you're actually looking for a cunning plan, because you know too much to swallow the in-world cover stories, then there are obvious possibilities.

So I need yet a third layer of cunning plans. In addition to the three in-world-plausible cover stories, and the three amazing real plans, I have to construct three red herring plans. These need not be plans that the three characters actually consider using. They are alternative plans that the reader will imagine. They should distract the reader from the more astonishing real plans, so that the big surprises can come unspoiled. This may be the hardest challenge of all. I have to contrive additional cunning plans, clever and realistic enough that the reader will accept them as worthy of the story and the characters. In fact the red herring plans have to be pretty compelling; they have to completely stop the reader from looking any further. Yet I have to have good reasons why the characters don't use these plans, but follow their own real plans instead. And finally I have to get my narrator to suggest these red herring plans to the reader — his own red herring, and those of the other two characters as well, even though he himself may be taken in by their cover stories — yet without the narrator ever just lying to the reader.

Nonetheless I think I'm getting there. The third of these deceptive characters, who is not a protagonist, has just entered the story in this section, and will die at the end of it. So I have a lot of flexibility to redefine her character and her knowledge, in order to make things work. Neither the other characters nor the reader know much about her, anyway. So she's fairly easy, actually. And I think I have it pretty much worked out for the guy who is the current narrator. His real plan is so monstrous, and his cover story is so wimpy, that it's pretty easy to insert a much more realistic-seeming red herring plan in between. I can make the red herring plan be an actual plan that the narrator has in mind, though half-heartedly and with doubts. The narrator can quite realistically write things that will sound to the reader like hesitations between the realistic red herring plan and total cowardice, when in fact they are hesitations between the modest red herring plan, and the extreme rampage that will ultimately be chosen.

The toughest one will be the red herring plan for Anastasia. She's the character who is best known to the reader, and she is established as a preternaturally resourceful heroine. She already has a track record of getting out of tight spots with creative tactics. Moreover she narrated everything up to just the week before this episode, and in the past tense; she even told the reader directly, early on in the story, that her role in it would not be that of a victim. So the presumption that she is somehow going to get out of this must be very strong, and the reader will be on the alert for anything that might offer her a hidden opportunity. My only advantage with her is that she is no longer the narrator. So there can now be things that she knows, that the reader does not know. She can also do things out of sight of the current narrator — and the reader knows this, so the reader can also be made to think that she has done some things, when in fact she has not. I guess my other advantage is that I don't really have to deceive the reader for ever. I only need to keep the reader in the dark until close to the climax, when there's enough action going on that the reader will just read on to see what happens, instead of sitting back and thinking.

And maybe I can undermine the reader's confidence that she must survive because she still has to write the first part of the book, by suggesting that she may be writing it all now, and the book may be put together by someone else, from her notes.

Anyway, whew. This has all become quite the brutal tangle. And as if the plot weren't thick enough with deception, there are motifs of deception scattered around in setting and character as well. The massive sword that gets used in the end is not what it seems; it appears to be merely an impractical symbol, and its uranium core is covered in a layer of steel. The current narrator's realistic red herring plan will probably be to hide an ordinary greatsword inside an enormous wooden sword that's a prop for a play. The whole episode takes place in the castle of a rebel earl who is still pretending to be loyal to his king. And the narrator's cover story of wimpiness is specifically to be an effete thespian, who keeps talking about stagecraft and acting.

What a hall of mirrors. I don't know if any readers will ever be able to make head or tail of it, but as the author I can say that there's a tremendous satisfaction in finally blowing the whole place up and flying away from it, with everything finally straightened out and simple. There's an excellent chance that this is story is now hopelessly overwrought and overburdened, and its elaborate plot is either incomprehensible or blatantly contrived. I think there's still a chance that it will actually work, though. Almost anything can make sense, in the right context, and with science fiction, the author has an awful lot of control over context. If it does end up working, it will be one of the most intricate episodes of plotting that I've ever seen. It's been a lot of fun just to try to make it work.