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Dearest Squad,
It was right around this chapter that I realized that I really needed to remember what time of year it was. Most of Thieftess is set in inns, on coastlines, in the Permafrost, or on the sea itself. But when Thursday’s crew returns to a familiar land, what exactly does that land look like?
I mean, Arilland borders a Giant Enchanted Wood. It would probably be good to know if there are, you know, leaves on the trees or snow on the ground.
And let’s be honest…by this point in Thieftess, most of the characters—and I suspect most of the readers—have had their fill of ice and snow.
There is an infamous Excel spreadsheet that my dear friend Eric James Stone helped me conceive back during the copyedit of Enchanted (I had spent months working on revisions and alterations and this was supposed to be the final pass) when someone did the math and decided that Sunday was “too young” and Rumbold was “too old,” fey blood and fairy spells bedamned. Sunday was “not quite 16” (Lydia Bennet’s age in Pride and Prejudice) so I was informed that Rumbold could not be older than 20 (even though his age is never technically disclosed).
Pretty sure this was the edit that made me hate my first novel.
Gods bless Eric, who helped me create a spreadsheet of all the main characters’ ages, so I could get a better sense of who was how old when certain Big Events happened, because now I had to shoehorn my book into this fixed timeline. I had to do a close read of every chapter to make sure every reference to something that happened “before Sunday was born” or “a decade ago” was actually correct.
We assumed a 12-month calendar and I chose a generic year to make things “easier.” I gave Jack Junior my birthday—January 11—and went down the list of siblings from there.
I’m a world builder. Very little of this ends up in the book, but it all lives in my head forever. I was never going to reveal the exact dates I plugged in to this spreadsheet, but I knew the woodcutter birth order and who was born in what season. Ergo, I technically know what astrological sign all the Woodcutter children are. (Ha! Next book: Astrology of Arilland)
The “exact ages” pass on Enchanted took me almost as long as the one where I had to cut 30,000 words out of the original draft…but that Excel spreadsheet lives on. It is VITAL to my fairy tale World. I refer to it every single time I wrote a short story set in or around Arilland. I know what time of year each novel is set in (Enchanted happens in the autumn, thus the orange leaves on the Nameday cover and the apples for sale in the market) and how long each one takes.
I’ve known how old Ashes has been at every single moment.
So when it came time for my pirates to Return to Arilland, I opened up my spreadsheet and checked a few things. Seven’s Seas visited the Permafrost in winter—ouch, but that tracks with the northern lights—which meant that when they saw Arilland again, it was early spring. Excellent. Trees are especially beautiful in the springtime.
It also meant that Peter, our sentimental spring child, would be having a birthday.
What better time to celebrate the reunion of a few precious Woodcutters?
xox
Princess Alethea
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