The Dynasty epic fantasy series came, of course, from Lord of the Rings.
It was opening night of the Fellowship of the Ring in December 2001. I was twenty years old. I had just seen a near-perfect onscreen recreation of my most treasured book of all time. I saw Gandalf on screen and he was just as warm and kind and powerful as I’d always imagined. My mind was racing when I got home. I was never going to get to sleep. I started reading Fellowship again for the twentieth time.
As I read I started thinking… what would MY version of Lord of the Rings be? Just like I created Terminus eight years earlier to be MY version of Star Wars/Trek. Being a big comic book nerd, my first thought was ‘what if Gandalf could fly?’ My second thought was, well then he could just fly over to the evil lair and end the story right there. (Let’s not get into the eagles debate. They were servants of Illuvatar and not meant to interfere in the story!) My third thought was, ‘what if he chose not to?’ That was my leaping off point for the story. I started thinking about the moral implications of that. What sort of character would possess the power to help and decide to let others take the risk instead? This in turn took me to thinking about the morality of your typical medieval fantasy setting of rich corrupt kings and poor villagers. What if there was a character (a woman, of course) with our modern day sense of right and wrong who decided to rebel against ‘the way of the world’? What if this was the ‘villain’ the wizards fought, or sent others to fight?
I didn’t start writing right away, of course. It stayed in the outline stage for years. I eventually worked out an entire trilogy of an epic war between the forces of good and evil with a healthy mix of moral ambiguity on both sides. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 had a huge influence on the story. I suddenly found myself with a current event mirroring the planned story in a twisted way, raising the question of the futility and morality of invading another country in the name of saving it from itself. I even found myself giving some Dick Cheney quotes to my characters.
I completed my first novel, The Secret Apprentice, in 2006. What an accomplishment! I had finally put my money where my mouth was. I immediately started querying publishing companies and learned the dubious joy of constant rejection. I started writing the sequel, The Lord of the East, right away but found myself quitting halfway through. The story was about to visit a brand new land based on historic cultures I didn’t know enough about to write. This hurdle kept me from coming back to the story for almost a decade until I improved my skills enough to learn to write through the mental blocks and blank spaces.
That first novel has been almost completely re-written, word by word, over the past eighteen years. Several times. I’m a very different writer now than I was when I first started. Every once and awhile I’ll come across a sentence that actually appears to have survived from the original draft. It’s usually in an action scene. I seemed to know what I was doing from the get-go there.
The original version of the novel definitely had an emphasis on spectacle and action. Character and dialogue became much more important to me as I matured as a writer. I still like the spectacle though! I’ve put a lot of work into this first novel and I’m happy with it. My only regret is the story builds and improves so much in the sequels, I worry that readers will never get to the highs because they didn’t make it through the beginning. Here’s hoping they enjoy the first one enough to keep going, because it just gets better and better!
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