Welcome to my profile! Add this book to your library for profile updates beyond what I announce:
❖ Progress reports on my ongoing projects
❖ Announcements of new things I'm writing behind the scenes
❖ Rambling about anything from queer rep to c...
I know there's a weekly Q&A posting in here right now, but I also said I'd use this book to announce new projects I'm working on, and, well.
Um.
I may or may not have started my next epic series midway through May?
It was an accident, I swear.
It totally wasn't an accident.
And then I wanted to yell about it here, but realized this whole saga has thus far been restricted to readers who follow my writing shenanigans on Discord, which meant I have to explain myself. It's probably high time I made a post about it anyway, so here I am... because my Hattu Empire series (aka Desert Epic) has been a line item in my monthly roundups since January, but the full story runs much, much deeper.
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As I write this, it's been 9.75 years since I started my first book: Frost on the Grasslands, book one of the Shelha Series. Written over nine of those years, it spans six books and 570k words. Now, this isn't huge, as true epics go. The Harry Potter series has 1.1M, the full Percy Jackson series has 2.6M, and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series clocks in at a staggering 4.4M. But I started those Shelha books as a teenager, and for something written and rewritten without any knowledge whatsoever of how to plot, I'd say 570k is worth being proud of.
It also had a level of complexity that none of my newer series have come close to. This is why I've always called it an epic even though my ongoing trilogy might be almost as chonky once finished. The trilogy simply doesn't match the character count, number of subplots, world-ending stakes, and overall drama of the older series, so I call one an epic and the other my trilogy, and move on with my day.
Now, this oldest series came to occupy a special place in my heart for a number of reasons. Two of those are inextricably linked: its aforementioned complexity, and its writing time. Epic series really aren't like anything else you can write. They're so big, so deep, and occupy your mind for so long that any interaction with them as a writer feels like stepping into another world. It's the difference between imagining a book-world's features, and having one that's so well-developed, you can walk around inside it, studying its landscape, history, mythology, and the lives of the humans who live in it as if you were actually visiting. It's such a powerful feeling, it's hard to explain.
You also get to know those characters better than the ones of any other book. You are invested in their lives, their growth, their journeys, and their relationships for a decade or more. By the time you're that far in, you might have known them for longer than you know most of your friends. Their voices spring into your head with vivid nuance. You know their quirks and neuroticisms, their habits and behaviors, their preferences and connections. You know a thousand tiny things about them that you've accumulated over so many years and so much writing that nothing else in your WIP repertoire comes close.
This is the magic of epics. Readers who love them are there for that kind of texture, and for writers, the experience is even stronger. The writer of an epic will know even more than ever makes it into the books.
