Experimenting as I write
With every book/series project I’ve worked on, I’ve done something different.
I mix things up partly because I like the challenge, and partly because it prevents me from getting bored. And trust me, no one wants that.
The Relics of War
With the Relics of War series, I wrote multiple viewpoints (6 in the first 2 books, with a 7th coming in the final installment.) It was written entirely in third-person/past. Pretty standard for epic fantasy, though I had some fun with the non-humans inhabiting that world. Playing with the Murkor language was entertaining too.
Hunted
This was the first time I experimented with a first-person/past narrative. I liked it, but it was definitely something I had to get used to. Hunted was also the first (and so far only) urban fantasy novel I’ve written. It’s a different mindset writing fantasy set in the modern-day real world.
Then there’s the Caein Legacy series.
It’s also in first-person/past, but that’s not a perspective you see very often in epic fantasy. I also decided to write a mage’s journey into the series, but seen from the viewpoint of the mage’s guardian, rather than the mage themself. It was a gamble, but based on feedback and reviews, I think it paid off. I also took an unknowing risk with the main character of the series…When I first came up with the idea, my husband and I were having a random conversation about fictional stuff (as we do), and the topic of werewolves came up. He mentioned he’d read of werebears and werecats too, and me being me, I said, “Why are there no weredragons?” And so, I wrote a dragon-shifter (not realizing that it was a big thing in romance books!)
Wraith and the Revolution was my first adventure in present tense writing.
I didn’t go into that project planning to write it that way, but when the first few paragraphs started to flow, I had one of those epiphany moments.
It was, “Oh, shit, I have to write this in present-tense, and I don’t know if I want to do that.” I tinkered with it for a couple chapters, decided I liked some of the freedom it provides, then ran with it. (I liked it enough I wrote my duology that way too.)
Speaking of the duology…
The Fontayne Company, it was my first foray into cozy fantasy with romance as part of the main plot. This meant I had to get a couple beta readers involved that aren’t part of my usual team, since romance is something that has a lot of expectations. The verdict, when it came back, was I did pretty well. 😊 Book 1 is currently with my editor, and I’m aiming for a 2027 release.
And as I mentioned last week, one of my projects for this year is to go through and reevaluate/revise the existing books in The Mage War Chronicles.
The first 7 books are drafted (this is a project I started back in 2020, but since I still haven’t drafted the final books yet, nothing is published.) This is another series written in third-person/past.
You might think revising it is a fairly straightforward process, but believe it or not, I did something with this series that I haven’t done previously. (Yes, another experiment. I can’t help it.)
I decided to make every book feature a different main character. Sometimes a storyline starts before the end of the previous book (it could be by days or months, depending on the book.) Some events are seen in multiple books too (for instance, there’s an execution mentioned in the last third of book 1. That same event is mentioned in book 2, and it’s actually seen in book 5. All at different points in the individual books’ story arcs too.)
Needless to say, keeping track of the timelines between books was challenging. Since I’m at the revision stage, all of those dates/times have been ironed out and are consistent. But as I was writing? I was constantly going back to previous books to make sure the timelines matched. (This is another reason why none of the books are published yet.)
In addition to the timelines, there are certain bits of dialogue that had to match between books too. To say I was feeling ambitious when I started this series might be an understatement.
But the challenge has been accepted, and I don’t think I’ll be getting bored any time soon.