I hate full-on summer heat (there’s a reason I hid inside the house while growing up in a tropical country), so it was great that we received quite a bit of cloud mixed with the sun over the weekend. We had oysters, which were really fresh–so fresh you could taste the ocean in them. The last time I had oysters that fresh was when I risked red tide poisoning and picked them off the beach near a dock ten years ago.
And just in case you think I was exaggerating, this was the aforementioned deadly oyster (it was delicious, but it gave me cramps. We all do stupid things in our youth).
Obviously, during the drive, I blabbered a lot about my work. I tell myself it’s to keep my husband awake, but who are we kidding?
Still, it was good to remind myself how The Agartes Epilogues was plotted out. Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t do it to confuse people. I played a lot with story elements for that series, and one of the things I did was to create repeating patterns so that when the “main plot” emerges, the reader realizes I’ve been telling this story all along, from the very beginning.
There’s a number of these patterns playing out. More observant readers should be able to figure these out (just think about the various relationships presented in the first and second book, and the most common, repeating themes. The Prologues are extremely heavy-handed with these). A common complaint about the series is that some of the action happens in the background, but as some people have mentioned, this is all intentional. The way I tried to write this out is that the story is being told through these patterns and personal struggles of each POV character, which I decided to do to bring the “minor characters in an epic fantasy plot” concept to life.
Some of the more obvious sources of these patterns:
- Camden’s quest
- Hana and Dai
- Kefier and Rosha
- Narani and Ichi
It’s a bit heavy-handed if you know to look for them (in my opinion, anyway), but the whole point of it is that when the story starts to take a turn, the reader should feel more than just a passing interest at the events. The climax of Act Two of Sapphire’s Flight is a great example. How that act ended infuriated and distressed a number of readers. Again, not done as a cheap effect, but a storytelling element that was building up from the very beginning of Jaeth’s Eye.
What I was hoping to achieve was to make readers feel, and then at the end, understand. This is why I don’t consider my series a true grimdark, despite the massive body count and detailed descriptions of death sometimes. These characters’ lives just play out, and the story is told as a way to “highlight” key events of their lives which bring the themes forward.
Of course, writing this way was a headache, and I’m glad to be moving forward with my new series, Annals of a Bitch Queen, which is a simpler story in concept. A lot simpler. And if you like my writing style, but hate the attempted subtlety of The Agartes Epilogues, you should really give the new series a chance, as it is way more straightforward, faster-paced, and just a more “rollicking action” than the previous series. Heck, I stuck to one POV! Book One, The Wolf of Oren-yaro, is set for release on January 29, 2018.
