Today’s the day! I’m so excited to finally share Shroudling with you all!
The uphill battle to a novel
It’s been a long, uphill battle, plagued with lots of false starts, running out of gas, getting stuck, trying to get unstuck, spinning my wheels a lot, and finally, finally finishing a draft that I didn’t think completely sucked. Then revising that draft again and again, until I thought it was something worth paying an editor to work on.
I’ve written before about this long journey. In April 2022 I thought I was Coming Out of the Pandemic Drought, and then in June of 2023 I was finally Coming Unstuck. I also admitted at that time that I Was Wrong About Writer’s Block. So I’m not going to bore you here, but this novel has been a long time coming.
What surprised me about Shroudling
When I sat down to write this story, it really was just a story. The basic premise of the novel started its life as a 10,000-word piece written to submit to a Rhonda Parrish anthology1She did accept my second submission, set in the Circle City Magic universe, and you can read it in G is for Ghost!. She rejected it, telling me it needed to be a novella.
Surprise! It decided to be a full-fledged novel of 65,000 words!
As I sat down to tear the story apart and find where it needed more depth, I realized it answered a question I had raised a few times, obliquely, in earlier Amethir books. As I continued plotting, I realized this was actually all vital information that would have an impact on the outcome of the conflict taking place in the books.
And as I wrote, this story demanded to become Book Five of the Storms in Amethir series.
What Comes Next
I’ve already written a few thousand words of the next and final book in the series. Yes, final. Really. I mean it!
Why are you looking at me that way?
LOL seriously, though, I do have an end in mind for this series, and I do believe that the next book will take us there. One of the supporting characters in Shroudling is someone I always intended to have a major role in the Amethirian Civil War that started in The Weather War, so the threads that character brings have been woven into the tapestry from the beginning.
One of the things I regret about the Storms in Amethir series is the haphazard way in which it was written. I love this series, and I believe in it deeply. But if I had it to do over again, I would love to have had the chance to plot the series out of whole cloth instead of starting book four and then going back to write three backstory pieces first.
That said, there have been pieces I discovered along the path of writing this story, and there are so many things I love about this particular installment. As I say in the dedication, which is to my best friend from high school, Tiffany, ultimately this book is in honor of best friends.
I hope you love the friendships in this book as much as I loved writing them.
