Extra: Roots of Culture, Stars Brilliant as the Milky Way
Not part of the main story. You can skip it; the main story is in the next chapter.
There's a bit of rambling before the extra, around two thousand words. You can skip it and scroll ahead.
My right brain might be too active. I often get distracted while writing, and sometimes I write the end of a chapter first, then work backward... That's also why I say I don't divide chapters by word count. Once I decide what a chapter needs to cover, a single chapter can sometimes run seven or eight thousand words.
That is also why I usually release two chapters in a row.
It had been like that across several books. Only recently did I start posting one chapter first to hit a timing point, then releasing another afterward.
And whenever that happened, the earlier chapter would have less content than the later one.
Speaking of getting distracted, I think I mentioned back when I wrote Nonhuman that I spent ten hours a day writing.
My personal record was spending twenty-six hours writing just six thousand words, plus forty thousand words of discarded drafts. That was during Brainhole Explosion. I had too many ideas for that book at the time, and it ultimately became a complete mess. I failed to write most of what I wanted to write.
I learned a lesson with Blue White Society, so I focused on the main thread and chose a single angle to write from. I carried themes such as "the whole world is white, and I alone am black" and Severing the Heavens throughout the book. Whether it was the Mohists, the Little Brotherhood, the Blue White Society, or the rebels of ancient times, from small to large,