Favorite line I wrote for the horror novel today:
"We were all psychically stranded."
(non-dominant handwritten page)
Read it early:
Author commentary (Audio transcript) 2026-10-17
There was an unexpected challenge with this chapter.
It was handwritten, and I’m getting used to writing by hand. I’ve been doing it more regularly recently. The first thing I wanted to mention was writing between my left hand and my right hand.
I’ve taught myself to write with my left hand. I’m right-hand dominant, but my left hand, through sketching and then writing, has become pretty strong.
But I find that when I write with my right hand, like I did a few days ago, I can write faster, but my thoughts about what I’m writing sometimes don’t keep up. My hand gets ahead of my thoughts.
With my left hand, it flows at the pace of how I’m developing the story, or what I see as the next line or the next image I want to convey. So in a way, it’s harder, but then it’s also easier because I’m not writing as fast.
There’s kind of a sync-up there with the greater difficulty of writing, but then more real-time rendering, I guess, from my head to the page, to the words.
So that was the first thing.
The second thing was the original plan for this scene. All I had was kind of the joke with Domino and Kuina, and him being between her legs, being ridden. That was the start of this scene. I’ve had that in my head, that they were going to be riding these three from Ishigaki Island to Iejima.
Everything else was kind of unplanned, and I was filling in the gaps. This is our first time going back to Ryu’s perspective in three chapters. The reader now knows what he’s up against and what’s waiting for him on Iejima, and they know it’s a huge trap.
So there’s that tension, but they’re waiting for their brief. The plan was to do the brief as they were on the water.
But then I was like, well, I need to give the Orca brothers their moment, because I’m planning on dismissing them pretty soon. They’ve kind of fulfilled their purpose through the Ishigaki arc.
I wanted to give them another moment to be the Orca brothers and do their back-and-forth thing. They’re the closest thing to comic relief that I have right now.
But the big problem that came up was the geography.
I started to end the chapter, and I was like, wait a minute. You probably can’t get from Ishigaki—because Ishigaki’s far. I forget how far down it is from the main island. The plane flight itself is, I don’t know, an hour and a half, two hours? It’s pretty far.
So I was like, how long would it take a whale shark or an orca whale to get there?
And it turns out it’s several days.
So I was like, oh shit.
The character dynamics were so well developed in the Ishigaki arc. We know the situation Kuina’s in. She knows her days are numbered, and she’s trying to come to grips with that.
So that’s her focus on the horizon. She’s trying to keep her chin up, keep her strength up, still be Kuina in that kind of defiant, “I’m gonna carve my own pathway” way.
But when you know your expiration date—basically, you know your death date. You don’t know the exact day, but you know it’s coming soon. How do you cope with that?
Everything’s kind of been said there.
And then Ryu and Sharla had their moment at the end of the Ishigaki arc, where their relationship’s in this weird place. Sharla’s trying to be cheerful, but she’s going through her own things, and this is going to be the beginning of developing her fate in this story too.
So she’s trying to be cheerful and do things, but Ryu clearly sees through it.
I wanted to flesh that out, but I was like, I don’t need to have a whole RPG party sequence where they’re sitting around the campfire—or in this case, sitting in a raft at night.
I don’t need to do the whole dialogue thing. We’ve already said what needs to be said.
And the good thing is Ryu’s a very terse narrator, so he can just give you data and the facts. He doesn’t talk a lot about how he’s feeling, and that kind of worked out.
But yeah, that was a huge obstacle. That’s a pretty big deal with geography.
Even though I could have heavily compressed this journey, I decided not to. I decided to add the last part where he’s narrating, yeah, it was just days of us riding them, resting. Ride, rest.
Because it would take a long time, and it wouldn’t be a pleasant journey.
He kind of downplays the unpleasantness. He has that one line, “Discomfort is familiar again.”
But yeah, that was a huge puzzle to solve for this chapter, and I solved it in some way. It worked out.
Rest of the chapter
Exhibit 060 - AI Analysis (39 mins)
