I had maybe half a dozen blog posts, mostly about epic fantasy, planned all throughout…that gestures at the world but I kept putting it off. There’s a limit to how much one can say about things and sometimes all one wants to do is curl up in a ball in the corner of one’s bed and scream just enough to let out your frustrations but not so much the neighbours think you’re being murdered.
In fact, I’ve been putting a LOT of things off. Including talking as much as I should for the upcoming sequel to The Wolf of Oren-yaro, The Ikessar Falcon. I’ve been busy with a bunch of other things–revisions on Book 3 AND a new project, and also drafting another project, and also one more thing I don’t even know how I can still think these days but
Yes, it’s coming out in less than two months, on September 22.
Like with most writers (and particularly, epic fantasy writers, because boy do we go wild on those word counts), I hit the big Middle Book dilemma with this one. I wrote it immediately after The Wolf of Oren-yaro, but I wanted to avoid the difficulties I had with the last Book 2 I wrote (Aina’s Breath), which was easily the weakest of the trilogy. Maybe. Some people liked it the best out of the three! My husband did. I asked him why, when I said it was so slow…the book stepped on the brake pedal and allowed us time to get to know the characters more.
He said that was exactly it. He was getting to know them better. Two of them were happy. There is still a rose-coloured glasses feel to some of the scenes in that book that I use to this very day, because some of the most crucial events that gave life to Chronicles of the Bitch Queen happened during Aina’s Breath. Sometimes it’s okay to go slow, just to really show what’s at stake.
But I knew I couldn’t afford the same mistake with The Ikessar Falcon. This industry is brutal on most midlisters, and a woman of colour already dealing with the challenges of getting people to read her work in the first place has to make some sacrifices. The Ikessar Falcon took whatever I learned from The Wolf of Oren-yaro and tried to simply expand on it.
The end result is a fast-paced 220k-word epic fantasy novel, a book of contrasts that I once could only dream of writing. It has some of the most ridiculously amazing (and some heartbreaking) scenes I can’t help but be proud of. I can have them play as a montage in my head over and over again–that’s how much I loved writing them.
Of course, getting there was a pain in the neck. The first time out, during my self-publishing endeavours, I fell flat on my face. The consensus on the editing round was not good and I had to rewrite a good portion of the first act and then somehow exact surgery on the rest of it to move scenes around and insert or remove characters and make a story that works. This meant really making sure I understood tension and flow and pacing. This is not easy when you’re also trying to expand character arcs and worldbuilding and plot. I also did this under a time crunch, because by then the novel was up for pre-order on Amazon and I also needed to finish Book 3, which meant I had to do all these rewrites and revisions in about 6 weeks. (I remember working twelve hours straight at one point).
There was also a lot of stress in my life at the time because we lost a roommate and I wasn’t sure how we were going to pay bills. I was going through graveyard shift job listings, since childcare costs tend to eat up anything I make on a day job. Stress is probably one of the top motivators for me (the other one is spite), so I managed to get through those first round of revisions even though it was like pulling my own teeth.
Now fast forward to today. I feel like the Orbit edition of The Ikessar Falcon is a solid sequel. My editor’s notes were top-notch (it is amazing how much of a difference top-tier editing can make) and pushed me towards some of the best (new!) scenes in the novel. It is the first truly epic fantasy novel that I feel shows off some of my best work and style (deep, deep character development AND crazy high concept blow-your-mind action scenes), and I can’t wait to share it with everyone.
Especially since this time around, Talyien gets to face dragons…
The Ikessar Falcon is available for pre-order.
