You Can’t Handle the Truth

Hello, dear readers. The sun is shining here, which I’m enjoying from inside, settled in my favorite comfy chair. Honestly, I’m pretty exhausted, as I spent Wednesday-Friday at the Public Library Association conference. It was exciting for obvious reasons, like all the advanced reader copies (ARCs) I scored from the publishers who were there.

^{A small sample of what I returned with.}

But there were also some surprise highlights, like members of The Ohio State marching band.

^{No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, or a marching band.}

Point is, you really never know what to expect from Librarians. We’re a pretty crazy bunch. But that’s not all that has been on my mind lately. I’ve also been thinking a lot about Vikings, and now you’re going to be thinking about them, too. (Aside—Can we make Vikings the next Roman Empire? That would be cool.)

So, just as a general rule, I like Viking history. Actually, I like Medieval history overall, and the Vikings played a big part in that. It’s battles for power and thrones (sounds like a good book title), as well as exploration and the totally underappreciated ability of the Norse people to assimilate everywhere from Kievan Rus to France to England. Thanks to the TV shows Vikings and Vikings: Valhalla, I’ve been inspired to delve into the real history of these folks even more with some great nonfiction books, the best of which I think is The Wolf Age by Tore Skeie, translated by Alison McCullough.

But I recently read another excellent book about the real life of a central character on Vikings: Valhalla, Harald Hardrada, The Last Viking by Don Hollway. I enjoyed the book a great deal, and it got me thinking about what the plan might be for the upcoming third and final season of V:V. Given the arcs that have been set up, there might very well be some shifts in power, (spoiler, King Canute currently reigns over the North Sea Empire), but to whom power might shift and how far into history the show will go, is hard to say with only a limited number of episodes left. But the storyline I’m most interested in (and frightened to see) is what they plan to do with Harald as he reaches the Byzantine Empire.

^{Mmm. Hello Harald, aka actor Leo Suter.}

As I said, given the dramatic arcs the show has been building, I feel like they are heading toward Harald’s attempts to claim the thrones of Norway, Denmark, and England, but I’m not sure how the writers would plan to approach that, because of the blending and compression of time, particularly the fact that in real life, Harald was a generation younger than the other main characters, like Canute, Olaf, and Leif. Anyhow, Season 2 left him on the road to Constantinople, where in real life, he spent about a decade. And what did he do there? Well, that’s the truth I think the show won’t dare show.

According to Hollway, Harald was very close to two Byzantine Empresses—Zoe and Maria. How close? With Zoe, almost certainly very close, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. And with Maria, if not physical, the closeness was real and intense emotionally, but also possibly in that other way. Why do I think the show will shy away from this? I mean, having your hero bang a couple of empresses is exactly the sort of thing a Netflix show ought to go for. And you know what, they might go there, but I’m willing to bet a million dollars that I do not possess that, if they do, an important fact will be left out.

They were both old enough to be his mother.

Actually, Zoe was nearly old enough to be his grandmother.

Because, apparently, Harald liked cougar hunting, if you will forgive the metaphor. Which, honestly, just makes me like him all the more. Not simply because I am a middle-aged woman who likes when the world acknowledges that women this age might still be desirable, but because I love the idea of Harald being attracted to women of experience and power. And think of the character arc—he goes from banging the skinny young thing in the pilot to having years long relationships with women of a certain age.

I would so be here for Harald’s appreciation of mature women, but the show already started to destroy his character in Season 2, and I’m not holding my breath they will fix the problem in Season 3. As I mentioned at the time, the show took Harald from being a clever man who could talk anyone into anything in Season 1, to being an incompetent himbo in Season 2. And as I’ve learned from the Hollway book, the Season 1 portrayal is much more accurate. Harald was incredibly wily, as well as a poet, a trait much admired by the Norse people. In fact, for folks who watched the original Vikings series, remember how in Season 3 Ragnar sneaks into Paris by pretending to have died and hiding in his own coffin? Harald pulled that trick for real to capture a city, because he was just that cunning.

The real Harald is an utterly fascinating guy, and that should be enough for me. There are books and the true history to delve into. But I can’t help being irrationally annoyed that V:V has made him less interesting already, and will likely make him even less awesome in the final season. Apparently, the writers just can’t handle the truth*.

~S

*Yes. I appreciate that history in this era can be hard to pin down, so some of Hollway’s book is the historian’s best guess. But tell me his guess wouldn’t make awesome TV drama, and I’ll call you a liar. Point is, when this version of Harald is an option, I don’t understand opting for something less compelling.

Third Winter?

_{In Northeast Ohio, the struggle is real.}

Here at Unicorn HQ, we woke up to snow on the ground, and considering that we lost an hour to the start of Daylight Savings Time, that seems fundamentally unfair. S wants to go out for a walk and do some writing today, which will be fun. One last chance to wear our winter coats and gloves before things finally turn warmer (we hope).

In writing news, thank you to everyone who bought our books during the recent sale. If you missed it, don’t worry. I’m sure there will be another sale sooner or later. Or you could pay the regular price and get the books now—we always try to make our work affordable. Speaking of which, our newest release, A Sorceress Made, will be coming out on March 27 for the low, low price of $1.99 (USD). It follows the first book in the Moiriad, A Sorceress Born, which you can pick up right now for the same price. You don’t, strictly speaking, have to read the first book to understand the second, but you’ll probably want to, anyway.

Last night at our bi-weekly Gemot (a.k.a. our business meeting), S and I discussed the growing popularity of the subgenre of “cozy fantasy” or “low-stakes fantasy.” She assures me this is a thing right now. As I understand the concept, these are fantasy books where there isn’t some dark lord or great quest or terrible threat to the world. Like if The Lord of the Rings ended with Bilbo’s birthday party, but he never ran off with the Ring, and the most dramatic thing that happened was the Sackville-Bagginses taking away some of his spoons.

That’s pretty much exactly the subgenre that the Moiriad fits into. All three of the books are made up of short stories, but they’re all about Moira Darrow growing up and learning the pros and cons of her magic powers. Fair warning: if you go into these books expecting high drama and magic duels to the death, you will be disappointed. If you go into them expecting to see academic shenanigans and a bright young woman blundering into one ridiculous situation after another through mostly-unwarranted self-confidence, then you will get exactly what you’re looking for.

_{Shenanigans! Blunders! Unwarranted self-confidence!}

So, that’s the Moiriad. In other writing news, S is continuing her revisions and additions to Called to Account, the first book in our next series, Years of Exile. We had fun last night pacing around the house and discussing one of the characters we love to hate the most, Duke Aldrick Sigor. You may remember this odious jerk from such books as Royal Obligation, Siege of Kings, and A Troubled Peace. Not to give too many spoilers, but Aldrick slithers up again to play a major part in Called to Account. And you’ll get to meet his daughter (actually, she showed up in A Troubled Peace already, if you’re keeping track). So, we got to discuss what sort of a person this daughter is, and what kind of relationship she has with her ass of a father.

As for me, now that I’ve finished the last nautical adventure of Captain Vendi, I’m going back and revising the whole series, starting with the first book, called Last Outpost. I actually wrote that one before I had any idea of doing a Vendi series, so it’s a little different from the others. (Fun fact: I wrote the first draft of that book for NaNoWriMo 2014, at the exact same time S was writing the first draft of The Queen’s Tower.) I’m not going to change everything, but I am doing a little to make it fit in better with the rest of the series. Most notably, I’m writing a new first chapter for it from Vendi’s POV. (Originally, she was only the secondary POV, which is very different from her other books, obviously.)

I also reworked some of the existing chapters. First of all, I split a few of the longer ones into two chapters. Back in 2014, when I did the first draft of Last Outpost, I didn’t really think as much about how long chapters should be, so the longest chapters in the book were like 4,500 words long. Obviously, those can just be chopped in half. In addition, I have now combined two chapters at the beginning and have taken out a bunch of other stuff that didn’t really need to be in there. When I originally wrote the book, it was over 63,000 words long. Now I’ve got it down to about 55,500. I’ll add about 2,000 to that with the new first chapter, so it’ll still be shorter than it originally was.

The most important changes I’m making are in the main character herself. She’s a little too incompetent in the original draft, and there are things that she doesn’t know about naval life that she clearly would know after ten years of training as (essentially) a midshipwoman cadet. There’s a danger, when trying to give your main character an arc, in making him or her so weak, or dumb, or cowardly (or whatever) that the reader isn’t interested in reading further. I think Original Recipe Vendi teeters on the edge of that, so I’ve leveled her up a bit. And I’m hoping her first appearance in the first chapter will show why she has the potential to be awesome someday, even if she’s still young and hasn’t quite reached her full awesomeness yet.

And that’s what we’re up to here at Unicorn HQ. Keep your fingers crossed for real Spring.

J

Why Moira? (A UniWriMo Update)

_{Pictured: Definitely not Moira. But that’s okay. You’re beautiful just as you are, chubby unicorn.}

Here at Unicorn HQ, we’re staying inside and having a writing day. That’s mostly because it’s really cold out there, but also, as we’ve mentioned before, it’s Unicorn Writing Month (a.k.a. our own, private NaNoWriMo).

Yesterday, at our bi-weekly Gemot (our little business meeting with just the two of us), we uploaded the next book in the Moiriad, entitled A Sorceress Made. It seems like just yesterday we were putting out the first volume, A Sorceress Born. But, yeah, it was a year ago. In case you’re wondering the third volume, A Sorceress Abroad, will come out in March, 2025.

If you’ve read the first book, I hope you enjoy the second one, too. (And if you haven’t read the first book, there’s more than enough time to go get yourself a copy and start reading.) Whether you’ve read the first book or not, you might be wondering why exactly we decided to do three books of short stories concerning Moira, of all characters.

Well, first of all, we like Moira. She’s a fun character to write because (as I described her once to S) Moira has a self-esteem problem: she has too much of it. So, she’s constantly getting herself into situations that a more cautious or self-reflective person would be able to avoid. The second reason is that we like school stories, and basically, the Moiriad is one big, long school story. The third reason is that, like all fantasy authors, we have tons of backstory and worldbuilding that never shows up in any of the books we write. Some of that concerns how hillichmagnars (i.e. wizard ninjas) get trained. To be totally honest, one of my goals with the Moiriad was simply to explore some of that worldbuilding that we’ve done, and to give myself an excuse to expand on it a little more.

Anyway, that’s what’s coming up next for us: the release of A Sorceress Made. It goes on sale March 27. Watch our social media for info on preorders, so you can be sure to reserve your copy. (I mean, it’s an ebook, so it’s not like your favorite bookseller is going to run out of copies, but preorders are still nice.)

In the meantime, S is still hard at work on revising and expanding Called to Account, the first book in Years of Exile, our next series. It picks up where A Troubled Peace, the last book in our previous series, ended. And, as it happens, Moira is one of the main POV characters. If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that she finished the first series in The Last Bright Angel by running off with the roguishly charming but somewhat unreliable sorcerer Faustinus. And in A Troubled Peace, we learned that she and Faustinus finally got married. Well, as she told Robert Tynsdale in that book, “There are easier things than being married to a man as awash in his own self-importance as Faustinus. There are easier things.” In Called to Account, you’ll find out how that relationship is working out for her.

As for me, I’m done with The Stolen Sea, the last Captain Vendi book, and now I’m working on teaser short stories for upcoming novels. I sort-of picked which stories I wanted to write at random this time around, and by chance, the first two I had to write were from the POVs of a couple of the most unpleasant characters I’ve ever written. So, that was kind-of fun. The one I’m working on today is from the POV of a much nicer character (Callista Ferria, whom you might remember from A Troubled Peace), but it’s a really sad and tragic chapter in her life. Poor girl. Maybe I’ll have a cocktail on her behalf later on.

So, keep an eye on our social media, and get ready for more educational hijinks next month in The Moiriad, volume 2: A Sorceress Made.

J

Verdict: We’re Ready for NaNo

In case you missed it, we have a new book out: A Troubled Peace. It’s the sixth and last book in the Reign of the Eagle series.

_{Look at all those covers! Just look at them!}

Apparently there are people now who won’t even start reading a series until it’s finished. So, if you’re that sort of person, rest assured that it’s safe to start reading. You can find links to the whole series now on our Welcome page.

It’s been a busy week here, and not just because of the book release party. As I noted two weeks ago, I got called for jury duty. So for seven days, I had to get up early and drive downtown to the Justice Center. (That sounds like a place where superheroes hang out, but it is, in fact, a stark, brutalist skyscraper designed by someone with a keen sense of irony.)

_{This would look a lot cooler with Batman and Wonder Woman. I’m just saying.}

Most people who get called either end up sitting around and doing nothing for a couple days, or are selected for a jury panel and then eventually released for one reason or other before the trial starts. I, however, got “lucky” and actually sat on a jury for a criminal trial. It was really interesting, especially having been to law school, to see how everything works from the inside. In case you’re wondering, I’m allowed to talk and post about the trial now that it’s over. We found the defendant guilty on some charges, but not guilty on others. Afterwards, the judge and attorneys from both sides came back to the jury room to talk to us and answer questions (that’s one of those things they never put on TV). They all said our verdict was pretty much what they expected. It’s nice to know we got the right answer, I suppose.

Anyway, I didn’t get nearly as much time to prep for NaNoWriMo as I expected, but all the same, I got the outline and character files finished for my next Vendi novel. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have character profiles already done for all the main characters in the series, so every time I write a new book, all I have to do is update things. In other words, I sit down and decide what Vendi and her friends have done in the two or three years since the previous novel ended. That part is kind of fun, actually. The only trouble comes when I have a character who is returning after not appearing in several books in a row, and suddenly I have to make up ten or twelve years of their life. And I have to make sure that in doing so, I don’t contradict anything I’ve written anywhere else. That can take a while. Vendi’s character profile alone is eleven single-spaced typed pages and 5,691 words long.

In other news, S has been coming up with names for countries in our new, non-Myrcia vampire novel. I’ve been helping, too, but she’s done most of the work. If we’re very lucky, then later today we might get to start naming cities and rivers and mountain ranges. It’s not easy, exactly, because we have to Google every place name we invent to check that it’s not the trademarked name of some prescription drug (that happens more often than you might think), or a minor character in some video game, or (most unfortunate) an obscene word in some language we don’t speak. In spite of that, however, it’s a lot of fun, at least when we’re doing it together (as Unicorns are wont to do).

J

Five, Six, Seven Novellas!

_{Special bonus: the original version of the cover, before I toned down the purple a bit.}

Hey, did you know we’ve got another book coming out later this month? Well, we do. It’s called A Troubled Peace, and it’s available for preorder right now.

A Troubled Peace (or “ATP,” as we call it around the house) is the sixth and final novel in the Reign of the Eagle series. I suppose I should call it the “thrilling conclusion.” Authors are contractually obligated to refer to the last book in a series as a “thrilling conclusion.” Seriously, though, it is pretty cool, and if you’ve been reading our books so far, we think you’ll really enjoy this one.

The book has an interesting structure. Rather than following the same POV characters all the way through, the novel is made up of separate novellas, featuring a shifting cast of characters as the civil war between the Gramiren and Sigor dynasties heads toward its climax.

Originally, there were five novellas. Then I added a sixth one to show a certain very important event involving a character who has been around since The Queen’s Tower, way back at the beginning of our previous series, Of Duty and Silver. No spoilers, but it’s a big moment for this character, and it’s simply not the sort of thing that can happen “off-camera,” as it were. The reader has to be able to see it happen.

So, if you’re a writer yourself, or even just a normal person with conventional ideas of story structure, you’re probably wondering, “J, why would you try to write a book like that? Why not just have a normal novel with a single normal narrative?”

By way of explanation, here’s what I wrote back in May, 2018, when I was writing the first daft of the book to be S’s birthday present:

“I once made up a timeline of everything that happens during that […] war, and about a week ago, as I was trying to come up with something to write next, I was looking at the events that happen […] between books. A lot of it was interesting, but I couldn’t think of a single storyline that reasonably tied it all together. Hence, a series of shorter stories.”

And there you are. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might recall that something similar happened when I was planning When You Are King and Old Habits Die Hard (the fourth and fifth books in the series). Those were originally going to be a single novel. But the big problem was that one of the POV characters in When You Are King, um…shall we say…becomes unavailable at the end of the book (I’m trying not to give spoilers here). And several of the main POV characters of Old Habits Die Hard, like Morwen and Molly, are just going about their normal lives until events transpire that propel them into the story.

You can imagine what sort of book that would be—one POV character just falls off the face of the earth, and suddenly there’s this new cast of people that the reader is supposed to care about. Alternatively, I could have pointless, boring chapters about Morwen and Molly doing chores or going to parties or whatever at the beginning of the book, so that the reader thinks they’re dull as dirt before they get to do anything interesting.

S and I actually made that mistake during one of the rough drafts of the very first Myrcia novel we wrote together, and trust me, it made for some pretty boring, pointless scenes. We kept thinking, “Oh, we don’t want the reader to forget about so-and-so!” But trust me, it’s better that the reader forget about a character than for the reader to think, “Who is this dork, and why does the author keep making me read about him doing nothing?”

When you write in third-person limited point of view, like we usually do, then when you plan a scene, you always have to ask yourself, “Whose POV will this be from?” And the best and most interesting answer usually is, “Whoever has the most at stake in the scene.” So (and again, I’m trying not to give too many spoilers), at the beginning of A Troubled Peace, the two factions have again (for their own reasons) decided to try to arrange a marriage alliance between Prince Broderick the younger and Princess Elwyn (just as they did back at the beginning of the series in Black Eagle Rising). Obviously, the people who have the most at stake here are Elwyn and Broderick, Jr., so they have to be the POV characters. But the next novella shows what happens after this plan (inevitably) falls apart. Broderick and Edwin (Elwyn’s brother) are now looking for wives to ensure the future of their respective dynasties. They’re the ones with the most at stake, so Elwyn gets dropped (don’t worry, she comes back later), and Edwin becomes a POV character in her place.

I think I did the right thing by splitting When You Are King and Old Habits Die Hard into two novels. And by the same token, I think it was the right call to split A Troubled Peace into five novellas, each with its own story arc.

Now, as it happens, once I added the sixth novella, the book started to assume something resembling the shape of a normal novel, almost in spite of itself. But there was still something missing to tie the dark night of the soul to the climax. And that’s where S’s contribution to the story comes in.

Howdy! This is now S, and I’m here to tell you how ATP became a novel in seven novellas, when I inserted the penultimate novella. J was absolutely right when he decided that the resolution of certain storylines simply could not happen off screen. But he inadvertently created a new problem, in that the transition into that new novella was a bit, well, clunky.

When he realized this, he turned to me and said, “Hey. Is there any chance you want to smooth this out? I think it could make an interesting Rohesia story.”

Because we are married and a unicorn and all that, J knows just how to talk me into writing something. Rohesia has become something of a specialty of mine. When he wrote the first books in this era of Myrcian history, he had Rohesia in the story, but she was never a POV character or especially well developed. That all changed when we wrote Royal Obligation, Book 3 of our first series, Of Duty and Silver, and she became a hugely important POV character. And then when it came time to add a storyline for her in When You Are King, I took on that responsibility as well. I’ve grown rather attached to her, so I dove into her ATP novella with gusto.

And if I do say so myself, I think it turned out pretty well. More than anything, the new Rohesia novella provides the missing piece to make ATP feel like a continuous narrative, even if it does rotate POVs. Although, I guess you will all have a chance to decide for yourselves on October 25 when it publishes. Hey, did we mention that it’s available for preorder? (Well, everywhere except Amazon, of course, where it will be available on pub day.)

And that’s all from us for now. Newsletter subscribers should keep an eye on their Inboxes tomorrow, as we will be sending out a new short story. And, if you haven’t already got your copy yet, don’t forget that Reunion Vale is now available in paperback!

_{Seriously, this would look awesome on your bookshelf.}

J&S

Camping Plans

_{I bet the Discount Tent works better in the summer.}

It’s really summer now, and the high temperature today will be 87° F (or 30.5° C for our international friends). That means it’s a perfect day to stay inside. We’ve got a lot of work to do around the house, for various reasons we needn’t go into at the moment. Suffice it to say that spring cleaning is a little late this year. We’ve been doing a bit at a time, wiping down all the shelves and cupboards, so every day, there’s a new pile of stuff somewhere on our kitchen floor—canned goods, cleaning supplies, spare travel mugs, or liquor bottles. Today, S will be mopping the kitchen floor while I vacuum the carpets in the rest of the house. It’ll be thrilling, I assure you.

Speaking of long projects, you might have noticed down in the footer of our website that we’ve finished the final proof of Red Sand Girl, our next standalone novel, which comes out in late July:

_Huzzah!

It’s the origin story of Pallavi Ratnam, a sorceress who shows up in several of our other books, including Old Habits Die Hard, which will be on sale this coming Wednesday—don’t forget to preorder a copy.

_{Adventure! Excitement! Passion! Betrayal! Nuns!}

Of course, if it’s the end of June, that means it’s time to get ready for July Camp NaNoWriMo. Those of you who read this blog regularly will remember that there are two “Camp NaNo” sessions per year—one in April, and the other in July. We do both sessions, plus the slightly-more-formal, actual “National Novel Writing Month” in November, because they make good incentives to work on big writing projects that we might otherwise postpone in favor of other chores, like vacuuming or a deep cleaning of our kitchen.

This coming month, we’ve got a lot of fun stuff to work on. S is going to start her revisions of A Troubled Peace, the 6th and final book in our current Reign of the Eagle series. It’s kind-of an interesting book. When I wrote the first version, it was subtitled, “A Novel in Five Novellas.” Then, when we decided it would be the last book in this series, I wrote a sixth novella to provide closure for the series arc that begins in Black Eagle Rising.

There’s a certain Major Event that happens between the end of that original first draft and the start of the next series, an Event involving a major character who’s been around since The Queen’s Tower, and we simply couldn’t let it happen “off screen,” as it were.

Well, then we realized that we needed a little more explanation of how that Major Event comes to be, and who causes it, and why. Plus, even though much of the book takes place in the Immani Empire, we hadn’t mentioned Vita or Tullius or Presley or Grigory at all. (Because we hadn’t invented any of those characters when I wrote the first draft.) Consequently, S decided to do a seventh novella, which will go between the original end of the book and the sixth novella I wrote earlier.

So, much like Douglas Adams’s “increasingly inaccurately named trilogy,” my “Novel in Five Novellas” will now consist of seven novellas. But it will be a better book for it, trust me.

As for my camp projects, I’ll be writing some short stories, as usual. If all goes well, in fact, I’ll be writing the last short stories for the third volume of the Moiriad (the first volume is out now, by the way, if you haven’t picked up a copy yet). Also, I’ll be writing my next matriarchal nautical adventure novel, starring Captain Vendi. And this one even has her back at sea, which will be very exciting, I’m sure. I’ve been working on the outline this past week, along with the character profiles.

As I think I’ve mentioned, updating the character profiles is always one of the biggest jobs before writing one of these books in the Vendi series. Each novel starts roughly three years after the end of the previous one, so I have to figure out what all the major characters have been doing for the past three years. And because most of these people are military officers, I have to decide who’s been promoted, and who might have retired, and so on. It’s fun, but it takes a while.

So, that’s what we’re going to be doing in July. But for the time being, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some vacuuming to do.

J

Yet Another NaNo

_{Character profiles! The first eight pages are all one character. No, I’m not kidding}. _{I don’t think I could come up with eight pages about myself or anyone I know in real life.}

It’s still not really spring here at Unicorn HQ. The sun is out and shining bright, but the temperature is below freezing, and my weather app informs me that there’s a Winter Weather Advisory for snow this afternoon. Won’t that be fun.

Yesterday, instead of winter weather, we gave up our afternoon to Wagner. There’s a new production of Lohengrin with Piotr Beczała in the title role, so we decided to give it a try. The Met Opera Live in HD productions are shown around here in a theater with big, reclining seats, which was nice because the opera started at noon and ended at 5:00. And yes, an hour of that was taken up with the two intermissions, but whatever else you can say about Lohengrin, you can certainly say that it gives you a lot of opera for your money.

Well, no. You can say more than that. The opera was very good, as was the cast. And the production was visually interesting, with backdrops of stars and planets, and big post-apocalyptic ruins, and a huge chorus in these changing, color-coded capes. The music was good, too, even if there was an awful lot of it.

_{The famous part of the opera where Gryffindor faces off against Slytherin for the House Cup.}

Anyway, now we’re at home, waiting for this winter storm that may or may not materialize. We’ll probably do laundry in a little while, and then it’s time to do some outlining and character profiling. Yes, it’s mid-March, and April is just around the corner. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you know that April is the first Camp NaNoWriMo of the year, and of course S and I have to come up with writing projects.

My main project this month will be yet another of my matriarchal nautical adventures, starring Captain Vendi. This will be the seventh Vendi book, or rather, the second book in the second Vendi series. One very good bit of advice S and I once received was to break up long series of novels into multiple shorter series. In other words, if you have, say, 12 books in a row starring the same character or characters, then rather than making it a 12-book series, you should have three series of 4 books, or maybe 4 series of 3 books. For some reason (perhaps because more and more people refuse to start a series until it’s “finished”), this tends to lead to better sales.

So, I’m planning Vendi’s next adventure. And in addition to making an outline for the book, that also means updating all the character profiles. All the Vendi novels take place roughly 3 years apart, so whenever I start a new book, I have to decide what she and her friends and crewmates have been doing all that time. As you can see in the top pic, this can result in some very, very long profiles. Vendi’s is up to 8 pages now. And if there are going to be any new characters, of course I have to make profiles for them, too.

The absolute worst is when I have someone who’s been in multiple books as a minor character, never really requiring a formal profile. And then, suddenly, I have an idea for a story where that person becomes a major character. So, they need a profile now, obviously. But I can’t just make everything up off the top of my head, as I would with an entirely new character. I have to go back through all those previous stories and record everything they’ve done and any bits of physical description or personal quirks that they might have. And sometimes that takes a long, long time.

For instance, there’s a character named Enni Takala, and I originally made her up as a student in our new school story collection, A Sorceress Born (available for preorder now). She’s a very serious, dedicated magic student who earnestly tries to keep out of trouble, which makes a nice contrast with her best friend (and the main character of the stories), Moira Darrow. I never really did a character profile for her, because I had a pretty good idea of who she was, and her backstory never really mattered, and to be blunt, her function most of the time was just to show up and say, “Oh, Moira, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” Or words to that effect.

_{School stories! Magic! Teen Romance! Flying pigs!}

But just a week or so ago, S was helping me brainstorm ideas for the next Vendi novel, and she said it definitely needed magic in it. And then we came up with a reason why there needed to be a sorceress in the book. And then we decided the sorceress should be Enni (partly because it’s nice to have crossovers between series, but also because Enni would have a lot of sympathy for the people—especially one person in particular—that she will encounter in this book).

Now, it’s very nice to have Enni in this new book, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy writing her. But first I have to go back through all the Moira short stories from A Sorceress Born (did I mention it’s available for preorder?) and make notes of what Enni is like, so she can be consistent in the new novel, even if the Vendi books take place hundreds of years after A Sorceress Born.

So, long story short, be sure to place your preorder for A Sorceress Born. And that way, when we eventually start releasing these Vendi books, you’ll be able to look forward to Enni showing up in the second novel of the second series. Yes, that will be a long wait, but I’m sure it will be worth it.

Also, remember that Myrcia is officially available in three formats now! We’ve got When You Are King, the latest book in our Reign of the Eagle series, available in ebook. And you can get For Her Own Good in paperback. And there’s our new digitally narrated audiobook, A Glass of Sand and Stars, available at Google Play. Collect them all! Trade them with your friends!

J

When Who Is King?

_{Special blog bonus: the original version of the book’s cover! (It’s very orange, isn’t it?)}

We’re approaching release day for our next book, When You Are King. It’s coming out this Wednesday, Feb. 22!

Hopefully, you’ve already preordered your copy, but if you haven’t you should probably go do that right now. I mean, it’s an ebook, so it’s not like your favorite bookseller is going to run out of copies or anything. But you’re going to want to start reading immediately, I’m sure, and that means you should preorder the book.

Unless you buy your ebooks through Amazon, because they won’t do preorders through Draft2Digital. But in that case, you can write a note to yourself or set an alarm on your phone or something so you don’t forget the book is coming out this Wednesday.

As for us, we’ve got a three day weekend for Presidents’ Day here in the US. We’re going to celebrate tomorrow by taking the car in to have the oil changed. And probably do some more work on various writing projects. We have quite a few of them going at the moment. Just last night, in fact, we finished proofing A Sorceress Born, which will be the first book in a brand new series of short story collections that follow the training of a hillichmagnar (i.e. a wizard ninja) in the Myrciaverse. That will be coming out at the end of next month (March 29, to be precise). It’s got student hijinks, skinny-dipping, flying pigs, and magic gone very, very wrong. We’ll have more details about that later, but we’re very excited about it.

S suggested to me that in honor of the holiday, I should write a blog today about the best and worst kings and leaders in opera. But that sounded like a lot of work, so I told her that if she wants to write that post sometime, she is more than welcome to do so.

We haven’t done a who’s who post in a while, though. You know, where we show you who we’ve “cast” for the various characters in our books. As we’ve mentioned before, some people think this is a terrible idea, but we almost always pick various actors and celebrities to represent our main characters. There are a lot of good reasons to do this, not least of which is that when you’re cowriting a book, it’s very helpful if both writers know exactly what a character looks like. If S says to me, “Rohesia is blonde and pretty,” then I’ll probably have a slightly different idea in my mind than S does. But if S says, “Rohesia is Elisha Cuthbert,” then we have a concrete image to work with.

So, here’s who we like to imagine as the main characters in When You Are King. As always, you can feel free to completely ignore all of this and imagine the characters any way you like.

Edwin Sigor = Daniel Radcliffe, because of course he is.

Elwyn Sigor = Keira Knightley, as I think we’ve mentioned before

Kishori = Asin Thottumkal

Rohesia = Elisha Cuthbert, as previously mentioned

One last bit of news: we’re almost done with the new Google AI audiobook of A Glass of Sand and Stars. Release day is scheduled for Wednesday, March 8. So, if you’re already marking your calendar, you might as well mark that day, too. As we mentioned a couple weeks ago, we’re starting our AI, computer-narrated audiobooks with the standalone novels. So, naturally, we want to know which of those standalone books we should release next. S, who does pretty much all our social media, is getting ready to do a poll:

_{All three are excellent choices. But we’ll let you pick!}

So, get ready to hear a couple computer voices, in all their glory, narrate some of our books! And don’t forget to preorder When You Are King. It’s all about a kid learning how to be a leader, so it’s even topical for Presidents’ Day!

J

Holding Out for a Himbo

^{Silver tongued brains of the operation or himbo? I know which Bonnie Tyler would pick. Gif by nina-zcnik.tumblr.com}

It’s a snowy Sunday of a long holiday weekend, and we are enjoying the comforts of home. We had wanted to go to the movie theater yesterday to see the live simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Fedora, but alas, with the icy roads, we decided to wait until it comes to the Met’s streaming service in a few months and watch it at home.

So what did we do instead? Well, we tried out our new snow blower (it is awesome!), and we did a couple loads of laundry, but we assume folks aren’t interested in our delicates. We also watched the new season of Vikings: Valhalla, and since I discussed S1, some of you might actually be interested in my thoughts on the latest adventures of a bunch of pretty Vikings running around doing crazy stuff. (If not, skip to the end for some publishing news!)

My major complaint about S1 is the bad habit of the greater Vikings TV universe to skip the scenes you actually want to see. That, unsurprisingly, happens again in S2. One of the most annoying also aids in turning a favorite character into someone else. Without getting into too many spoilery details, Harald Sigurdsson (IRL best known as Harald Hardrada to the history buffs in the crowd) in S1 is handsome and charming and has the gift of being able to talk just about anyone into doing just about anything. In S2, to borrow the terminology I see most frequently applied to him on Tumblr, he’s become a himbo. Yes, he’s still handsome, but instead of being incredibly clever and persuasive, he’s kind of a brutish dumbass. There are lots of scenes of him beating people up, but when he needs to convince folks to help him, he’s kind of incompetent, and the one time he succeeds in winning someone over and financially backing him, the audience is told about it after the fact and it’s not shown.

This is just one example of the show’s example of skipping the important scene. (Like last season, we once again get a couple of very powerful people in bed together without seeing the moment they decide to sleep together and instead jumping to them naked and chatting after.) There are also several moments of characters being conveniently stupid or incompetent (or overly competent) for the sake of the plot. This has always happened in this universe, but if you aren’t feeling particularly invested in the plot and all you have to cling to are your favorite characters, then when they behave out of character for the sake of the bad plot, it’s especially frustrating.

On the upside, the last episode was the strongest of the season, so I wasn’t left with a completely bad taste in my mouth. Which means I’ll tune in for S3, in which I sincerely hope we get more Canute. (Seriously, giving him something like 5 minutes total airtime scattered through the last 3 episodes is not enough for the most charismatic actor on the show. I sincerely hope his absence was a matter of the actor being in demand because he’s so good and not that the writers couldn’t come up with something interesting for him to do.) The other big question J and I have been asking ourselves is will there eventually be a big time jump (original Vikings did this), because the show spends a fair amount of time in S2 setting up 1066, even though that’s decades away.

Anyhow, enough Vikings. (Although, if you want to read about Vikings, let me take a moment to recommend once again The Wolf Age. OK. Now I’m really done.) We have actual publishing news! Last night we uploaded our next novel, When You Are King, to Draft2Digital! If you follow our self-publishing process, you might remember it takes a few days for new books to roll out to all the online stores so that you can place preorders, but it will pop up soon if you want to hang onto this handy link.  We are also hoping before the month is out to have For Her Own Good available in paperback! You will definitely want to watch this space for that.

And that’s all for us on this snowy day.

~S

Standing In

_{Taken before the place really started to fill up.}

S and I finally have managed to make it out of the house and go see our local orchestra. Tickets in the summer are really cheap, because they play at an outdoor amphitheater with lawn seating. You can bring your own lawn chairs or a blanket, along with the food and beverage of your choice. S and I opt for a blanket, which is the more fun option, in my opinion. But this time we remembered to bring pillows, because when you’re 47 years old, an hour-and-a-half or two hours is a long time to be lying on the ground.

Anyway, the concert was really good, with Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto (or “Rocky 2,” as my brother calls it). We had a substitute piano soloist, however, as the original guy somehow managed to injure his arm before the concert. Hope he’s okay, obviously, but his stand-in did fine in his place. On the drive home, S and I talked about what an interesting and potentially awkward situation that must be. What does a soloist do when he has to take over with little or no time to rehearse with the orchestra? Does the conductor just say, “Well, here’s how the other guy was going to do the piece, do your best to match it”? Or does the orchestra try to fit with the interpretation of the new soloist? The former would make more sense, I imagine.

So, that got me thinking about how that applies to writing. This came up recently, because we’ve started sending out our short stories for our next novel, Unspeakably Wooed. (The first story is called “Magy by Choice,” and if you’re a subscriber to our email newsletter, then you should already have it.) The next two stories will be from the POVs of characters whom I have written before, but S has not. But for various reasons which will be clear once you see the stories, they were a much better fit for S to write, rather than me. Naturally, then, S had questions. What is this character like? What sort of person is he? How can I get a feel for him, so my version of his POV sounds like your version?

We sat down and talked about the two characters, and by the end of it, S seemed to be pretty confident that she “gets” them now. In the case of one of the characters, I was trying to describe how he was a jock, but also a nice guy, so he’s super self-confident, but he’s also perfectly willing to admit when he doesn’t know something or when he’s in the wrong. And S said, “Oh, he’s Paxton Hall-Yoshida from Never Have I Ever.” (Which is a fun show, by the way, and you should check it out if you’re looking for something to watch on Netflix.) And I said, “Oh, yeah. I suppose he is like Paxton, isn’t he?” So, the funny thing is that I now think I understand the character better, myself, after that conversation, even though I’m the one who made him up originally, and I wrote a whole novel in which his is one of the main POVs.

As for the other character, I told S, “She’s the anti-Elwyn. Whatever Elwyn would do in a given situation, this girl would probably do the opposite.” And I think that helped S understand her, as well.

Obviously, that only makes sense if you’ve read one of our books that feature Princess Elwyn, like our most recently-published book, Siege of Kings. If you haven’t read it yet, then go buy yourself a copy right now and read it. And then, trust me, the idea of someone being “the anti-Elwyn” will make perfect sense.

Keep an eye out for S’s stories–the first one should be coming sometime next month! Be sure to subscribe to the newsletter so you get them first, before any of your friends. And be sure to follow us on social media, so you get fun bonus stuff, like the recent recipe for Elwyn’s Peppermint Shandy, in honor of Elwyn’s birthday (which was just this past week).

We love all our characters equally, but if we did have favorites, Elwyn Sigor would be one of them. And guess what? Today is her birthday! Celebrate by checking out her latest adventures in Siege of Kings while sipping this cocktail we made in her honor.https://t.co/Rn4rK6Mw9n pic.twitter.com/7ykgX4nCaD

— J.S. Mawdsley (@JSMawdsley) August 11, 2022

_{Doesn’t that sound tasty?}

J