A Step-by-Step Guide to Squirrel Wrangling
My highly structured approach to writing with a very unstructured brain.
September 2026 <> From the Vale
People talk about writing as though it’s this wonderfully mysterious creative process. A writer sits down, waits for inspiration to strike, and somehow a story appears. That is not remotely how my brain works. There is absolutely a creative part to it. Characters do things I didn’t expect, ideas appear at inconvenient times, and entire scenes occasionally arrive in my head almost fully formed. But my actual process is probably every bit as methodical and logical as it is creative.
My ADHD brain is very good at generating ideas, making connections, wandering down interesting side roads, and becoming intensely interested in whatever shiny new possibility just appeared. What it is considerably less good at is holding an entire novel in working memory at once. So I as I have been doing my entire life, I built external structure around the chaos. The outlines, lists, timelines, and increasingly ridiculous levels of detail are not there because I need to control every creative impulse. They are there so the creative impulses have somewhere to go without taking the whole book with them.
I don’t sit down with a blank page and start writing Chapter One. I build the book first. By the time I begin writing actual chapters, I already know where I’m going, why I’m going there, and most of what is supposed to happen along the way. Right now, that is exactly what I’m doing with Book Two of The Morrigan Cycle, and since I’ve finally reached the point where I can say I know what this book is actually going to be about, this seemed like a good time to explain how I get there.
Step 1: Figure out the quest
I start with a very broad idea of the main story I want to tell. At this point, I’m not thinking chapter-by-chapter, and I don’t necessarily even know the exact beginning, middle, and end. I just need the central problem—the thing that is going to propel everyone through the book.
That idea can still be remarkably vague. I don’t need all the answers yet. I just need to know what this particular book is fundamentally about and what its primary story is going to ask of the characters.
Step 2: Start collecting pieces
Once I have that, I start making notes about anything I already know I want to happen. These might be specific events, character growth, confrontations, reveals, conversations, changing relationships, or secrets that need to come out. Just as importantly, I make notes about the secrets that very deliberately do not need to come out yet.
Some of those ideas eventually become major plot points, while others may turn into a few lines of dialogue or a small character moment. Some will disappear completely as the story evolves. At this stage, I don’t worry about where everything fits perfectly. I’m collecting pieces that I may want when I start building the larger structure.
Step 3: Remember that this is a series
Because The Morrigan Cycle is one continuing story, each individual book also has to move the larger series forward. Fortunately—or possibly unfortunately—I have an extensive series outline that keeps track of the long-term character arcs, mysteries, relationships, political developments, and assorted secrets I have created for myself.
Once I know the basic story of the individual book, I go back through that larger outline and decide which of those series arcs belong here. What does Bran need to learn in this book? Which mysteries should move forward? Which relationships need to change? What needs to be introduced now because it will matter much later? And, perhaps most importantly, what am I absolutely not allowed to reveal yet? There are a lot of those.
Step 4: Build the actual plot
This is where I am with Book Two right now. I take all those ideas and put them into a very traditional, very structured plot outline built around the major elements of the story: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
This is where the vague collection of possibilities starts becoming an actual book. I decide what launches the plot, what the major complications will be, where the important revelations happen, what everything is building toward, and what happens once the central conflict finally breaks. I’m also looking at how those events change the characters and what position everyone needs to be in when the book ends.
By the time I finish this stage, I don’t know every tiny detail, but I know the story I’m going to tell. I know the major conflicts, the emotional turns, the important discoveries, and where the whole thing is headed. That is where Book Two stands right now.
Step 5: Make the outline slightly ridiculous
Once the major structure works, I expand it. Then I expand it again. And then, because apparently moderation has never been one of my defining characteristics, I expand it some more.
Eventually, I have an extremely detailed book outline containing basically everything I currently know. Events, locations, character beats, names, bits of dialogue, small interactions, foreshadowing, things somebody needs to notice, and things somebody very specifically needs not to notice all go into it. If an idea occurs to me and I know where it belongs, I put it there.
This stage takes a while because the outline becomes enormous, but it also means that when I finally start writing the book itself, I am very rarely staring at a blank page wondering what happens next. I’ve already solved most of those problems before I get there.
Step 6: Write the whole book without really writing the book
Next, I create what I call a “chapter summary,” although that is a terrible description of what it actually is. It’s much closer to writing the entire story while refusing to let myself care whether the writing is good yet.
I work through every chapter and get the complete flow of the story onto the page. The scenes are there, the basic prose structure is there, the dialogue is there in its simpler form, and the character movement and emotional beats are all in place. I just don’t allow myself to stop and obsess over description, perfect transitions, beautiful sentences, or whether someone has crossed a room three times without technically possessing legs.
By the time this stage is finished, that version is usually somewhere around one-third of the eventual length of the novel. It isn’t polished, but the skeleton of the entire book exists from beginning to end.
Step 7: Now actually write it
Then I go back to Chapter One and rewrite everything. This is the point where the structural version of the story becomes the actual novel.
I add the setting and sensory details, expand conversations, strengthen emotional beats, fix transitions, develop character reactions, and let scenes breathe where they need more room. Other scenes get tightened when I discover that what looked important in the outline really only needed half a page. This is where I stop worrying primarily about what happens and start paying much closer attention to how the reader experiences it.
Basically, I take the functional version of the story I built in the previous step and turn it into something I would actually want another human being to read.
Step 8: Edit the whole thing
Then comes editing. My brain hates this part, which is unfortunate because editing may be one of the most important stages of the entire process. The problem is that by this point, the story is already there. There are no new worlds to invent, no giant plot problems waiting to be solved, and considerably fewer mysterious characters standing around waiting to tell me what terrible decisions they intend to make.
Instead, I’m checking continuity and pacing, changing words, tightening scenes, finding repetitions, making sure transitions work, and figuring out whether somebody picked up an object three chapters ago that has since mysteriously vanished from existence. My brain considers this insufficiently entertaining and begins looking for other things to do.
This is how perfectly necessary editing time turns into things like designing maps, making cover art, building an entire website, or beginning Steps One and Two for another book. Purely hypothetical examples, obviously.
Step 9: Hand it to other people
Eventually, however, I have to stop touching it and hand the manuscript to beta readers. They get the book, and I attempt not to hover over them asking whether they have reached a particular chapter yet or what they thought about that one thing I absolutely cannot explain without spoiling something later.
Presumably we all grow as people during this period.
Step 10: Fix what they found
Once the feedback comes back, I go through it, look for patterns, decide what actually needs to change, and make another round of edits. Not every reader will react to everything the same way, so this stage is less about automatically making every suggested change and more about figuring out what the feedback is telling me about the book.
If several people stumble over the same section, something probably needs attention. If one person simply hates a character they were supposed to hate, I may actually be doing fine. Eventually, though, the changes get made and the manuscript moves another step closer to that elusive condition people refer to as “finished.”
Step 11: Panic
At some point, there comes a horrifying realization that there is no longer a legitimate writing-related task standing between me and publication. The book has been written. It has been rewritten. It has been edited. Other people have read it. Their feedback has been considered. The remaining task is simply to put the thing into the world.
This seems poorly designed.
Step 12: Publish the book and develop an entirely new collection of anxieties
I haven’t reached this step yet, so I can only assume it will be extremely relaxing and that I will respond to the experience with my customary composure.
I’m sure it will be fine.
Which brings us back to where things stand right now. Awaken the Raven has moved into the beta-reader stage, which means I have officially reached Step Nine with Book One. Naturally, I am also still working on the website I created while my brain was avoiding Step Eight, because apparently the consequences of procrastination can have their own domain name.
Meanwhile, Book Two has reached Step Four. The major structure is finished. I know the central story, the primary conflicts, the important character arcs, the confrontations and revelations I want to include, and where everything is ultimately heading. There is still an enormous amount of work between that and a finished novel, but the book has crossed that strange line where it no longer feels like a collection of possibilities. It has become a story.
And having Book One and Book Two reach those particular stages at roughly the same time led to something else. I finally knew enough about Book Two to understand what its title needed to be. I knew the atmosphere of the story, I knew the imagery that kept appearing as I built the plot, and I knew enough about what was coming to create the cover that belonged to it.
So Book Two of The Morrigan Cycle officially has a name:
THE STORM TAKES WING
And since apparently I am incapable of simply writing novels without also designing all the things that go around them, it has a cover too…. Which is absolutely going up on the website.
The storm is gathering…
Or it will be once I actually start writing the damn thing.