I had begun to write Empire’s Heir, the book I thought would be the next in my series, set about 18 years after the end of Empire’s Exile. The narrator was Gwenna, daughter to two of the main characters in the previous series. Early on, she was mentally describing another character, Sorley, and in that unfiltered flow that happens sometimes, from subconscious brain to keyboard, she told me something about him that made me stop and say “What? How? When?”

So then I had to tell his story, because it was important.

But because I hadn’t known I was going to, so I hadn’t thought about this story at all, it took a long time to take shape. I scrapped the first draft at 80,000 words and started again. At 130,000 words, I excised 40K to become the novella Oraiáphon. I wrote a bunch more, revised, cut, trimmed….and it still wasn’t right. Then one day I wrote one paragraph…and suddenly it WAS right.

It went out to beta readers and my developmental editor. Beta readers loved it, with some wise suggestions. The developmental editor did not, for both structural and story reasons. I listened, accepted some structural revisions, ignored the story reasons – because what he hated was the thing I hadn’t known, the thing the character Gwenna had told me way back when. (He still doesn’t like it, but we’re agreeing to disagree.)

So today the book that nearly wasn’t is out in the world, and some people will agree with my beta readers, and some with my developmental editor, and some will be in-between. That’s ok, because no book is right for everyone.

A deep breath, a few weeks to relax, and I’ll start (again) on Empire’s Heir.

You can read the first chapter of Empire’s Reckoning  here…and hear Paths Untrodden, Sorley’s song for Cillian.

Available from Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats.

Also available in e-pub format for Kobo, Nook, and other e-readers