Image created by Ruth Germon and Tristan Fisher, 2015. All rights reserved.
The fast publishing schedule continues to roll forward, and now the release for book three of The Fledgling Account is looming, on the 20th of October. I was thinking to myself the other day: “I really must write a blog post about this”. The only trouble is that I don’t fully know what to say about it – because the fact is, Servant of the King gave me virtually no trouble as a novel. I don’t know why that was. Maybe it was because it was still early enough in the series to be a smaller work, but late enough in the series for me to have gotten the hang of what I was doing with my first few books. All I know is that I only wrote it twice, which is a record for me. I typed out my first draft at fifteen, but the book that I wrote at age nineteen was basically a completely different story from the one four years earlier. You could hazard to say that I really only wrote one draft of this book. And it bothered me like anything, but I couldn’t think of what to change.
I won’t say that there weren’t problems with this book. For instance, there was one particular character in there – the Pirate King – whom I really dislike. Normally, I like even my bad guys. For instance, I have a love-hate relationship with the Lashki Mirah. He freaks me out something terrible, but I like him as a villain. The Pirate King Sirius was a different matter. Something about him just makes me very uncomfortable. For this reason, I have never been able to decide whether I wrote him well enough or not. However, my beta readers came back to me after reading Servant of the King saying that it was “the best of the lot” – fast-paced; scarcely a moment to breathe; high stakes; a determined and fierce main character; and an epic climax that goes on for pages and pages, but has enough variety to keep the reader from wondering: “When the heck is this going to end?” I myself couldn’t think of many ways to make the plot better, with the result that I often wonder if I’ve just deceived myself with this book. But then experience has told me that sometimes – about once in a blue moon when green panthers dance in polka-dotted boxers beneath six foot trees of algae – the first draft comes out right. In ten years of writing, there had to be one occurrence of that. I guess Servant of the King was it.
I can’t tell you much about this book, because some of you might not have even read the first one. For those of you who have kept up (admirably, admirably!), I will give these little hints, spoken in the deep and gravelly voice of someone who has been smoking for hundreds of years:
“People get attacked. People fall off things. People get burned to a crisp. Someone dies. Someone lives. And… someone ends it all.”
After that wonderfully specific synopsis, I’ll give you one that is slightly less seductive.
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“Rafen, how much would you give for Siana?” Sirius said.
Siana is still not liberated from the Lashki Mirah. Rafen faces a horrible decision: should he fight with the Pirate King Sirius or battle alone? Only Rafen can harm the Lashki, and it will take all he has to win Siana back for King Robert. As cities fall, Rafen realises he may not survive this fight … and his loved ones might not either.
Pre-order Servant of the King from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. (Book Depository to come soon, God willing).
Happy reading!
I won’t say that there weren’t problems with this book. For instance, there was one particular character in there – the Pirate King – whom I really dislike. Normally, I like even my bad guys. For instance, I have a love-hate relationship with the Lashki Mirah. He freaks me out something terrible, but I like him as a villain. The Pirate King Sirius was a different matter. Something about him just makes me very uncomfortable. For this reason, I have never been able to decide whether I wrote him well enough or not. However, my beta readers came back to me after reading Servant of the King saying that it was “the best of the lot” – fast-paced; scarcely a moment to breathe; high stakes; a determined and fierce main character; and an epic climax that goes on for pages and pages, but has enough variety to keep the reader from wondering: “When the heck is this going to end?” I myself couldn’t think of many ways to make the plot better, with the result that I often wonder if I’ve just deceived myself with this book. But then experience has told me that sometimes – about once in a blue moon when green panthers dance in polka-dotted boxers beneath six foot trees of algae – the first draft comes out right. In ten years of writing, there had to be one occurrence of that. I guess Servant of the King was it.
I can’t tell you much about this book, because some of you might not have even read the first one. For those of you who have kept up (admirably, admirably!), I will give these little hints, spoken in the deep and gravelly voice of someone who has been smoking for hundreds of years:
“People get attacked. People fall off things. People get burned to a crisp. Someone dies. Someone lives. And… someone ends it all.”
After that wonderfully specific synopsis, I’ll give you one that is slightly less seductive.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Rafen, how much would you give for Siana?” Sirius said.
Siana is still not liberated from the Lashki Mirah. Rafen faces a horrible decision: should he fight with the Pirate King Sirius or battle alone? Only Rafen can harm the Lashki, and it will take all he has to win Siana back for King Robert. As cities fall, Rafen realises he may not survive this fight … and his loved ones might not either.
Pre-order Servant of the King from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. (Book Depository to come soon, God willing).
Happy reading!
