It’s 1 am and I’m out of metaphors.
Seriously, though, whose brilliant idea was it to write a half-million word epic fantasy trilogy, complex plot and all, and somehow tighten it around a character-driven, thematically heavy narrative?
Oh.
Right.
I thought The Agartes Epilogues was pretty challenging. That one was a plot-heavy story that then throws it all away to draw focus on the character arcs and the themes, around which every scene and interaction was supposed to revolve around. This is…eh, more of the same, but I’m stuck with the one POV, and it’s all I can do to keep things focused. I don’t have the luxury of interludes or other POVs to keep things fresh. But I’m here, and the only way out of this mess is through it. So. With my spring and summer release just about ready to go, I’m going to be focused on writing The Xiaran Mongrel and wrapping up the Annals of the Bitch Queen trilogy.
Which really is going to be a double trilogy, which I might have mentioned before. Talyien’s story as first presented in The Wolf of Oren-yaro WILL be wrapped up in this trilogy, but there’s a lot of plot and a lot of characters in the background, and so please bear with me as I take the time to tell it all. I wish I could write faster, but there’s a physical limit to these damn fingers and this damn head.
In the meantime, I want to show an excerpt from Sapphire’s Flight, and one of the neat little “story within a story” concepts present in my work. Caiso is one of my favourite characters–a nobleman-turned-mercenary, and an amateur poet to boot. What’s not to like? Did I mention he’s showing up in Blackwood Marauders, too?
For over two hundred and twenty hours,
I said my goodbyes.
Given time like that,
what should have felt like a dagger to the chest,
sounded like a gift.
Two hundred and twenty hours.
A little over nine days.
I washed his feet and dressed his wounds,
and reminisced of quiet, sun-filled days,
the yesteryears of our boyhood
spiralling away from us into the realm of memories.
Loss, creeping up like that, could be a gift.
Loss, sudden loss, seems harder to bear.
Cleaner, others say, but I did not know that,
counting the hours,
every passing moment bringing us closer to the end,
the poison in my chest a reflection of my love.
Like children learning to swim, we think we drown in sorrow,
only to awaken on the shore to tempt the tides again.
He dies in my arms.
A gift. Others are not so lucky.
-Caiso apn Willen
