Tag: theshadowedpath

I’m very excited to have a new epic fantasy series coming out from Solaris in 2017. I’ve been referring to it as the Epically-Epic Epic Fantasy That Cannot Yet Be Named (or E3F for short) because we haven’t released the book or series names or the concept. Book one is in the middle of edits, so we’re closing in on a final version, and I’ll be starting on book two soon.

E3F marks the third completely new epic fantasy world I’ve created. My goal in developing this series was to come up with something very different from what readers have experienced in my Chronicles of the Necromancer/Fallen Kings Cycle world or my Ascendant Kingdoms Saga world. Likewise, I wanted to go in a fresh direction with the characters, the magic and the approach to religion.

How does a writer return to familiar territory (in this case, the quasi-Medieval epic fantasy setting) and still take the reader somewhere they haven’t been before?

The answer is: look at history. While many kingdoms coexisted in the same time period in real life, they were hardly identical. Their unique history, culture, political structure, religion (and interpretation of that belief system), geography, economic situation and climate all produced very different settings. Dial forward or backward by a few years, and you see more permutations in the waging, winning and losing of wars, exploration, conquering and colonizing of new territory, the impact of plague or political instability, invasion, natural disaster, and other variables that all dramatically affected the nature of the kingdoms, the choices of those in positions of power, and the stressors on the common people.

Those factors are the ‘ingredients’ I take into consideration as I’m building a new epic fantasy world. They determine what day-to-day life is like in the kingdom and surrounding territory, the fears and expectations of the powerful and the commoners, the decisions to be made and the ripple effects of those decisions. Are we coming off several years of stability and prosperity, or a decade of war, famine, poor harvests and plague? Is the king’s position secure, or are there rivals and threats both foreign and domestic? Are the army and the mages supportive of the king, or is treachery afoot? And what big incident is going to upset the status quo and start the plot ball rolling for the action in the book?

In the Chronicles series, the ‘big incident’ was the assassination of the royal family and the rise of Jared the Usurper. In the Ascendant Kingdoms series, it was the night of the Cataclysm, when the world burned and magic failed. In E3F, the incident that sets events in motion isn’t nearly as huge and important, but the repercussions grow into actions that change the course of history, very much in the tradition of the rhyme about how a kingdom was lost for want of a nail.

I can’t say much about the characters in E3F yet, but I will let slip that they’re not royals or nobility. They’re regular people, just trying to get through the day, until a sequence of events magnifies the consequences of their actions. Remember, ‘may you live in interesting times’ is actually a curse.

Stay tuned! We’ll be revealing more about the new series as we get closer to the summer launch!

My Days of the Dead blog tour runs through October 31 with brand new excerpts from upcoming books and recent short stories, interviews, guest blog posts, giveaways and more! Plus, I’ll be including extra excerpt links for my stories and for books by author friends of mine. You’ve got to visit the participating sites to get the goodies, just like Trick or Treat!  Get all the details about my Days of the Dead blog tour here.

Finally, let me give a shout-out for #HoldOnToTheLight-100+ Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors blogging about their personal struggles with depression, PTSD, anxiety, suicide and self-harm, candid posts by some of your favorite authors on how mental health issues have impacted their lives and books. Read the stories, share the stories, change a life. Find out more at the official Hold On To The Light website. 

The Shadowed Path is out now!
Buy: UK|US|Rebellion Store

How does it feel to come back to writing in my Chronicles of the Necromancer series?

The short answer is: it’s like coming home. 

It’s been five years since The Dread, the sixth novel in my Chronicles of the Necromancer/Fallen Kings Cycle series set in Margolan, one of the Winter Kingdoms. That series, which began with The Summoner and The Blood King, charted the story of Tris Drayke, the second son of King Bricen. When Tris’s half-brother, Jared, kills the king and the rest of their family in a coup, Tris and a few friends barely escape with their lives.

And as Tris struggles to learn how to control his newly-risen power as a necromancer, he needs a guide and a bodyguard to get to safety and elude the assassins Jared’s sent after him.

Jonmarc Vahanian is the perfect choice, and he’s got his own reasons for wanting vengeance on Foor Arontala, the blood mage behind Jared’s rise to power.

Tris Drayke might be the main character in the Chronicles series, but Jonmarc is a close second, and Tris owes his life and his rise to the throne to Jonmarc’s reckless bravery and insolent loyalty. By the end of the story arc, Tris and Jonmarc are close as brothers, and it’s clear their fates are inextricably tied together. It’s Tris’s saga, and the story of his rise from exile and fledgling mage to king and powerful necromancer is the focus of the action. But even so, Jonmarc’s redemption from bitter smuggler with a dark past to brigand lord and the most fearsome warrior of his generation runs in parallel, since neither story could happen without the other.

In Dark Haven and Dark Lady’s Chosen, readers got more glimpses of Jonmarc’s background. Jonmarc’s actions and choices not only affect his own life and the lives around him; but also the fate of the Winter Kingdoms. In The Sworn and The Dread, as Tris battles foreign invaders and a powerful dark mage, Jonmarc steps into the role of Queen’s Champion in neighboring Principality, risking his life to keep events from sending the seven kingdoms into a disastrous war, and we discover a few more tidbits about the bloody, painful past he has tried so hard to leave behind him.

I didn’t get to tell Jonmarc’s full story in those books because Tris was the main character. But I’d always wanted to write Jonmarc’s books, because his back story was vivid in my mind. So I started to bring out short stories – the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures–that are really serialized novels about what really happened to craft the Lord of Dark Haven and the fearsome fighter we saw in the books. 

Solaris, publisher of the Chronicles of the Necromancer, asked to do a collection of the first ten stories as well as an exclusive eleventh one written especially for The Shadowed Path. Of course, I said ‘yes’. 

The Shadowed Path starts at the beginning of the events that shape Jonmarc Vahanian and forge his future. The stories begin fourteen years before The Summoner, in a small fishing village in the Borderlands area of Margolan, where a fifteen year-old blacksmith’s son has no idea his actions will someday influence the rise and fall of kingdoms. 

If you’ve read the Chronicles of the Necromancer and the Fallen Kings Cycle, you’ll recognize many of the people in The Shadowed Path. Here, you’ll meet them under different circumstances, see them through a different lens. I’ve had a blast writing about these secondary characters in the short stories, many of whom take on a much larger presence than they had in the books. 

If you’ve read the novels, then reading The Shadowed Path will cause some deja vu, but you’ll find plenty of little Easter Eggs of tidbits that make things in the novel mean so much more. And if you haven’t read the novels, starting with The Shadowed Path puts you at the very beginning of the story, so it’s a win either way!

The Shadowed Path is out now!
Buy: UK|US|EBOOK