We don’t always know what will happen with the stories and books we write. ![]() I was working on the Radiants series with an incredible publisher and editor, and I decided it was finally time to bring these books out of the drawer they’d been in and present them for possible publication. ![]() I returned to these books again and again, polishing book one to a high shine, eventually completing and then polishing book two, and finally developing an idea for the third book in the trilogy. This second book built on what I’d done in book one, but the plot stalled at the 2/3 mark (as books often do) and, with other work to get done - now on the Islevale series - I put it away again.Īnd on it went. And finding myself once more with a bit of time, I started work on the second volume. A couple of years after that, I took it out again and edited it some more. But I certainly never forgot about my Celtic series, and a few years later, when I pulled the book out of the proverbial drawer, I reworked it, taking into account my agent’s editorial comments from that first draft, and all that I had learned since while writing the Thieftaker and Fearsson books. And abruptly, I had more than enough work to keep me busy for a few years. I loved this other book I’d written, but I knew it was part of a larger project, and I didn’t know yet what to do with the next books in the sequence. I had final edits to do on Thieftaker and I needed to get started on Thieves’ Quarry, the second book in that series. Yes, there is some serious shit going down throughout the book, but there is also humor and there are lots of unexpected twists in both the magical underpinnings of the story and the narrative itself. It sounds grim, and it also sounds a bit like other books we’ve seen before. The result was a contemporary urban fantasy steeped in Celtic mythology: two women, a Sidhe sorcerer and her human conduit, fighting off shapeshifting Fomhoire demons and their allies from the Underrealm, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. I didn’t know what to make of the scene I’d imagined, but working backward from it I filled out the character of this woman, I sculpted her world, which is basically our world with a magical twist, and I built other characters around her. Some introduce themselves piecemeal, like a jigsaw puzzle. Some books take form clearly and sequentially. She doesn’t know or remember why.Ī little weird, right? Ideas come in all shapes and sizes. And suddenly blood is cascading down her side. At last she finds herself picking at skin that looks normal but feels rough and scarred. She stumbles to the shower, but the pain only increases. The scene I first envisioned (not the first scene in the story) centered around a woman who wakes up from a night she can barely remember with a wound she feels but can’t see. The book remained untitled for a long time. When I named the file folder on my computer desktop, I just called it “NewUF” (new urban fantasy). And, frankly, I was not yet in a state of mind to tackle another rewrite on that front.Īnd so, with nothing else to do, I started something new. We were shopping the Justis Fearsson series, but sensed that the first book needed more work. The year before I’d finished my Blood of the Southlands series and had also published the Robin Hood novelization. ![]() We (my agent and I) had sold the Thieftaker books to Tor, and had turned in the first volume, but was waiting on revision notes. )Ī little more than a decade ago, in the summer of 2011, I found myself with nothing to write. (Sue me: I’m a writer, so I always build suspense, and I’m a historian, so I always fill in backstory. ![]() I’ll tell you, but first some brief background. I have signed a contract for a new trilogy with Belle Books. I have signed and sent the contracts, and they are (or soon will be) back in the hands of my publisher. Well, I can finally make the announcement official. So I posted my little teaser, forgetting the one immutable rule of the publishing business: Things always happen slower than one thinks they will. But I also didn’t want to say anything before all the details had been settled. I was thrilled, and wanted to let people know. Nearly two months ago, early in the new year, I posted on social media that I had some exciting professional news I couldn’t share quite yet.
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