We’re about four months away from the trade paperback launch of the epic fantasy novel The Wolf of Oren-yaro, and I’ve been working on a couple of really exciting things to celebrate. I’ll keep them under wraps for now, but suffice to say that I’m really happy with them so far.
It’s a little amazing to look back and see how much Agos-agan (the world that encompasses the Chronicles of the Bitch Queen, The Agartes Epilogues, and Blackwood Marauders) has grown in the nearly two decades I’ve been working on it. Hundreds of characters, each with their own little arcs, all that drama pushing and prodding them into stories of their own. Most I keep on the side, where they wait for me to find inspiration to tell their story at last.
That’s a damned word sometimes, inspiration. It’s like waiting to get shot by lightning. I don’t need it to write, but I think I do need it to find the fire that will light a story in the first place. I can’t just relay events and go through the motions. Every project I embark on needs its own sort of space and design–an idea, a point. Just like when you create a painting, you don’t do it without a palette in mind, then I can’t write without these themes and concepts and character journeys all working together to give each work a very distinct…flavour.
Take the Chronicles of the Bitch Queen, for example. It has elements of political epic fantasy, heroic quest fantasy adventure, grimdark action, romance/drama, AND heist. I’m not sure if I actually pulled off this insanity (I’ll leave the verdict to anyone who’s read the last book), but damn, it’s been a wild ride. I love the sub-worlds that came from it, too. Seeing Jin-Sayeng through the politics of the Dragonlords is different from running down the slums of Shang Azi. It’s a world I’m always eager to explore, which…
I don’t know if it truly works from a commercial perspective very much, but I can’t think like that. I need to give a damn about the characters I write about. I need to want to dig through their brains, to find–something, I’m not sure, but there’s a part there about how humans tick, how we interact, how we share space together and breathe and connect and make our peace in a very mortal, transient, cruel world. And it’s glorious looking back at this now, seven, eight books later, and seeing those connections spark up. Talking about these characters as if they were real, like, do you remember Rosha was born in Oren-yaro? Or that so and so met this character before, and that changed their perspective books later when they met this other person? Or that four years before Talyien met Khine, he…
