Welcome to the exterior history of my world.
I had made several attempts before Arcadia to create a fantasy world in which I could write- or, perhaps, that is not an accurate description. I was simply trying, desperately, to create a fantasy world. I can remember one attempt, named Andarin, where I did start with a story, and another, named Betwen Dreaker, where I started with a somewhat scientific catalogue of fauna. Neither worked. I was left, disconsolate, with tatters and the sneaking suspicion that I would never be able to do anything like what the fantasy authors I so admired were capable of.
Then, while sitting in a chair at my friend Randy's house and talking to her, I happened to notice a picture on her wall of two birds. Each slanted up at an angle, so that they crossed at the waist, and each had its head turned so that it was looking at its neighbor.
Alas, I found the bird more fascinating than the conversation, and so I can't remember what we talked about. But I took that bird home with me, thought about it, dreamed about it, and named it- gracken, probably because at the time I thought that was the actual name of the grackle. I elaborated on it, building in more details. My gracken, as it finally wound up, was a fearsome creature, a bird joined at the waist with two heads, four wings, and two minds, telepathic, with diamond talons, and spitting acid. No one in his right mind would want to face such a creature, but I liked it.
And I wanted a world for it.
Arcadia was thus created as a habitat for grackens, instead of for all the people who later came to inhabit it. I'm not proud of that, but perhaps it makes sense. I was ever more fond of animals than people when I was a child, and creating Arcadia, I was still a child in many senses of the term. I hadn't yet learned, for example, that a gracken wouldn't be able to fly, and that no bird could have diamond talons.
But what did I care? This was fantasy.
I chose the name Arcadia because I had heard of a region in ancient Greece by that name where fantasy and wonder were supposed to be common. I had also read fanciful descriptions of it by European poets that made it sound haunted by nymphs, satyrs, unicorns, and all the creatures I thought I would eventually want in my world.
Only later did I find out that Arcadia's main reputation was for peace and serenity, while I had made my world so dangerous that only someone insane would choose to go there. For the poor souls born there, of course, there was no choice.
Oh, well.
I did do some "research" for Arcadia before I started writing. I drew maps of the four provinces I thought the continent had at the time (it eventually increased to twelve) and created character sketches of the people I thought I would use for the story I wanted to tell, Swan Song.
Swan Song itself was a failure, but it taught me several things. The first was that I wasn't very interested in writing about humans, and that they weren't Arcadia's dominant race anyway. That original story had three human viewpoint characters out of seven, one half-human, one korin (a race I later abandoned) and one Elwen. It was the Elwens I later became (obsessively) interested in, and they are the ones I wrote in most of my books until novel sixty-five.
The second thing my pitiful little attempt at a story taught me was that I shouldn't work with multiple viewpoint characters. One was quite enough for me, and so I used that advice in the first novel I actually finished, Elwensong. I took my Elwen character from Swan Song, Keren, and began exploring his background. What I came up with was interesting enough that I wrote three stories about him that grew into novels. I was always sure I wouldn't finish each time I started one, but somehow I did.
The third thing Swan Song taught me, but which, alas, it took me some time to learn, was that I shouldn't do save-the-world stories. (Apparently I haven't really learned this yet, because I am currently trying again). Whether I wanted it or not, my style was more adaptable to personal stories about my characters, and everyday life in a fantasy world. Some of the stories I ended up telling were not necessarily everyday, with the characters involved in important situations, but the majority of my novels were about characters whose lives and personal situations were overpoweringly important to them, and thus to the story.
I seem to have created a run of self-absorbed characters.
During my first trilogy, my originally quiet conception of the Elwens began to change. I had thought there was one race. Wrong. There were at least two, my world firmly announced to me, and before long the story was bringing in members of the second race, and even making one of them Keren's friend. (Keren's people hated this second race, the curalli, but Keren made friends with one anyway. Keren was like that). By the time I finished my first novel and started the second, Elwenquest, I had realized there were five. And it grew from there. I currently have more than a hundred races of Elwens, of all kinds- shapeshifters, vampires, soul-eaters, sanity-feeders, swimmers, flyers, volcano-livers, and on and on and on.
I used Keren's friend, Echelli, as my viewpoint character for my next run of books, the Curalli Quintet. I found that I liked writing curalli, and that was probably what influenced me to make my most ambitous project then, the Silver Unicorn Empire, mostly about a curalli hero.
I didn't know what I was getting into when I left the Curalli Quintet and tackled the Silver Unicorn. I knew the form- the first three books to be told partially from the viewpoint of a rebel hero and partially from the viewpoint of the silver unicorn, Destria, who eventually became the Emperor- but I had no idea it would be so hard. The rebels were doomed, and in every case I knew that from the start. Yet I had to write them with some sense of hope and optimism. Destria wasn't completely evil, no matter how much the other characters hated him, and so I had to write him with some sense of sympathy. I was writing both sides of a war, something I've done since (and am doing now), and it never got any easier.
I was glad when I could finally move on to the last seven books in the Silver Unicorn Empire series, about Maruss, the curalli hero, and told entirely from his viewpoint. I still love Maruss, though I think now he was a little too perfect. He swore himself to the battle against the unicorns until the end of things, and he almost never complained, and he was self-sacrificing, and he was a great general, and he had charisma, and so on. About his only saving grace was that I wrote him with such humility that he was puzzled as to why everyone kept following him, and he would do what he could to discourage them.
After the Silver Unicorn (the last book of which, Silverdoom, took me five months and was 1508 pages long) I was very tired. I wrote two stand-alone novels, Middleman and The Sign and the Emblem. The first I liked, the second I didn't. My dislike of the second might have had something to do with the very different world it was set in- underwater- and all the necessary leaving-behind of everything I have become used to. I decided it was time to go among surface Elwens again, and preferably a race I had already experienced.
I chose the churni, the death Elwens who fed on life force, for my next four books (a trilogy and one stand-alone), and had fun. Though my death Elwens suffered, they came out all right in the end, and I was so happy at being able to write happy stories that I had no idea of the darkness awaiting me just over the horizon.
I wrote two interconnected books, the Darkness Duology, after those four, and that was equally fun. I was working with a character I liked, Zadok, and though I probably should have spent a longer time with him, it worked out well. Humming happily, I thought the time had come to write about another two characters.
Big mistake.
It sounds melodramatic to say, but the story I worked on next, the Elwenpride Quartet, came close to killing me at times. The doom and gloom of it overrode my last month of high school, the summer in between, and my first three months of college. I knew from the beginning what was going to happen, just as I had in the first three books of the Silver Unicorn, and to keep walking towards that horrible destined end took more courage than I thought I had. I thought about abandoning it, even talked about abandoning it, but in the end was incapable of walking away from (one of) the viewpoint characters I had. I brought it to its end, with tears streaming down my cheeks, and went on.
Honor's Keeper, the stand-alone I wrote then, had been brewing in my mind for a long time, and it went fairly well. I needed that when I reached the Blue Quintet, and had everything go mad on me. I didn't know where I was half the time in that five-book story, and that I liked writing my viewpoint character and was unwilling to abandon him didn't help. I finally finished the story, grumbling, and took sail on the next ship that came along.
That turned out to be my fifth stand-alone, Killsworn, and that worked fairly well. (I lost part of the first chapter last summer, so I don't have it up yet). Then came the Starseeker Trilogy, and my mood was bouyant. The next three stand-alones went well, and I was, I thought, ready for anything. I started writing the Rowansglory, which I thought would be a five-book series.
Ha.
The Rowansglory ended up ten books long, and I hated finishing even then. As I say on my page for that series, it was one of the most intense experiences of my life, and I would happily have gone on. It came to a good end, though it adversely affected the next stand-alone I did, Who Hunts The Eagle. My mind and heart were not happy at leaving Herran behind, and did an inferior job. I cut my losses with that and went on to the next series, my Quest Quintet.
After the Quintet was finished, and another character I loved abandoned, I had trouble. I did six fairly good stand-alones in a row, but they were all stand-alones, and I couldn't seem to find an idea to inspire me for the next series. It came to me that perhaps I had better leave Arcadia for a while, until I had some steam.
I worked in another world, Arion, for a while, but wound up abandoning that series. It was Dorren Goatleap who pulled me back, and I wound up writing a sequel to a novel that was supposed to be stand-alone; this is on Dorren's page. Then I wrote another stand-alone and two more novels before I again ran out of steam. Months passed while I wrote short stories and poems, and then I abruptly wrote two more stand-alones and an epic poem set in Arcadia. I thought I had returned for good.
However, my attention lapsed again, except for short stories. When I finally picked up my novel-writing, I was writing in the world of Orlath. But Arcadia was not abandoned. I've been working on Blood and Laughter, a new novel set there, and it's almost at the 100,000 word mark.
I don't think this world is really ever going to go away.
Back to the Arcadia page.
Back to my Home Page.
