I once confessed that I occasionally regret taking Jaeth’s Eye as far as I did.
Writing the novel was deeply frustrating. It was my first epic fantasy novel, and it took many false starts and iterations before I could pin down the “story within a story” format. And even then, now that it is published and the entire trilogy is finished, I realize that the non-traditional structure is its greatest weakness. I’ve had at least one reader make the assumption that it is a bunch of unrelated stories (it isn’t–it all converges at the very end). Readers repeatedly mention feeling lost or confused in the beginning, and many choose not to continue further into the series as a result.
I don’t blame them.
The very nature of The Agartes Epilogues makes it an “ambitious” trilogy, as one reader went so far as to point out. It requires complete surrender from the reader–that the reader abandons all assumptions of where they think this story ought to go and just watch the whole thing fall into place. And so telling an epic story from the sidelines–with an entirely different subplot and characters–was a balancing act from the beginning. I developed a method of overlapping outlines in order to force the story to take shape, and I still often found myself staring at a blank screen with my fingers on the keyboard, unable to proceed forward because I didn’t know where to start. I think my husband had often walked in on me pounding my head on my desk; he’d often just immediately walk out so as not to have to deal with my artistic tantrum. And I have loads of them, believe me.
The funny part is, a lot of my youth was spent around writer’s circles, where we talked about writing mechanics for the better part of the day. We dissected epic fantasies with precision. I could debate about writing from dawn until dusk. For the longest time, I couldn’t even enjoy fantasy because I was deeply critical of a lot of them–a reviewer from hell, as it were. And then I go and write my own story and suddenly all these theories blew apart in my face. Not that easy, is it? I found myself asking. I was as hard on myself as I was on everything I read. Harder, in some ways.
I swallowed my pride. I persisted. I finished the trilogy. I hit some marks. I fucked up others.
And now here I am, doing it all over again with a new series. And I suddenly realized that all my previous challenges, at the very least, served a purpose: I learned. After about a month of outlining, The Wolf of Oren-yaro flew from my head to my fingers in under three months, all 112,000 words of it. I asked beta-readers to keep an eye on pacing, and the comments have been encouraging so far. One beta-reader finished the novel in a matter of days, and he was only reading it during work breaks.
Annals of a Bitch Queen is a simpler series, overall. A smaller scope, though the word counts remain similar. One POV. A true hero, none of this “minor character” crap, though she remains well-rounded in many ways. But here I am, 124,000 words into the second book, and I wonder if I would have even gotten this far if not for that first, gloriously flawed attempt.
There’s still a lot to learn. Still a lot I’m trying to figure out how to juggle. The stories in my head aren’t going to go away anytime soon, and they grow with each page I write. I am hoping I get better with every series I spit out. I may not. But the awareness of what I’m trying to do is a start.
