It’s a cliché to say writing a novel is a labor of love, but it’s true. Both parts. I would only write 100,000+ words of a story if I were truly invested in it, but it’s still very much a labor. Some books are more labor than others.

Knight of the Chalice was one of those books.

Hopefully, you wouldn’t know it by reading it. My goal was to put out a novel that felt breezy and fun while still offering room for character development, something that’s a different flavor from Rapscallion while still slotting into that world and revealing some of its more fantastical sides. Well, technically, that was a later goal.

Because Knight of the Chalice wasn’t supposed to be a novel in the first place.

Remember The Rapscallion Interludes, my short fiction collection that came out a little over a year ago? Originally, Knight of the Chalice was going to be the novella at the center of the collection, a story about Kurt Rimmer that would see him go on an adventure to Alberon and resolve itself in 25,000-35,000 words.

If you’ve seen a copy of the book, you know I failed in that task massively. Sometimes, stories buck at the restraints of a length or format, and Knight of the Chalice was one such case. I realized that for the present day story and the relationship material with Lina to land, it would help to show more of Kurt’s heyday as a knight of the realm, and so I dropped in flashbacks (not as many as in the original outline, for the record– I do in fact know restraint). And there needed to be more time spent with the princess Anne before the big turn at the novel’s midpoint, so again the story grew beefier. And so on, and so forth, until eventually I looked at the outline and the percentage of it that I had actually written down as full scenes and realized there was no conceivable way I could make it a novella. So I set the story to the side, added the story “Wildsong” to the Interludes to round out that collection, and pressed on with Iconoclast. Once that book was in the revision stage, I could return to Kurt.

Writing Knight of the Chalice as a novel was… hard. I knew what I wanted the beats to be, and I knew how I wanted them to land, but breathing life into certain scenes was agonizing. The voice was tricky to nail down, the pacing was even harder, and I started to feel as though, multiple books in, I’d forgotten how to write altogether. But I finished, handed the first draft off to my partner and forever alpha reader, Alex, and waited in trepidation for the notes. “Help me fix this,” I told him.

There were a LOT of notes. I hadn’t cracked the character of Mary yet, for one, there were things I needed to show instead of merely alluding to, the pacing was still way off, and the end result was that the book didn’t land in the way I’d hoped. This would take a great deal of work to fix. But I wasn’t giving up on the book, not when I could finally start to see what it was capable of becoming.

Stephen King wrote in On Writing (a book every aspiring author should read) that in high school an editor jotted down a note on one of his stories: “Formula: 2nd Draft = First Draft – 10%.” By that logic, Knight of the Chalice, whose first draft came in at roughly 95,000 words, should have ended up at about 86,000 words. when all was said and done. Instead, the final draft is closer to 110,000 words. I was confounded by this as I revised. As much as I trimmed sentences for pacing and clarity, entirely new scenes cropped up and proved load-bearing for the novel.

I realized that during the first draft, there was still some small part of my mind that was treating the story as a novella, telling myself to get in and get out, fast. But this was a novel. I could let it breathe, and no one would tell me otherwise. After all, if a reader enjoys the 110,000 word version of a book more than the 95,000 word version, then they’re not going to be upset that they got slightly more book for their buck, are they? It went against all my instincts, but I genuinely believe the book is better for it. If you like Knight of the Chalice, don’t thank me– thank Alex.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a trilogy to finish. Not all of these notebooks are filled up, you see, and I need to remedy that. (Yes, I write my first drafts longhand, weep for my fingers.)

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