Like many of us, when COVID hit and we hunkered down in isolation, I thought about a project to keep me busy—a writing project, of course. Shakespeare did this during the plague—that’s where the comparison with the Bard ends. At this time, I was seven books into my Tanner-Dent middle-grade series, so finishing the eighth book seemed to be the de facto project. But … in the early days, it became clear my free time would be long, and I thought this was an opportunity to begin something new. So I thought about a project that had been percolating in mind since high school.
Way back in the 1970s, I was introduced to a band that really spoke to me. As a budding magician, I felt a connection to the Uriah Heep song The Magician’s Birthday. I listened to the album over and over. I acquired all the Uriah Heep albums as they came out. The lyrics, in many songs—mostly written by Ken Hensley—told a story that I imagined much larger than the songs. Over the years, as I wrote mostly mystery stories, I developed scenes for a fantasy story that had wizards and sorcerers. But I never wrote these down.
Fast forward to the year 2020, I dug these imaginations out of my brain and started to write a story. I drafted out these scenes and grouped them into a trilogy. I wrote the first book over the next couple of months. It worked out to just over 80,000 words. As I passed this around to beta readers, I drafted out the next book and wrote the last two chapters of the final book. Then the unexpected happened.
I had a one-page prologue that teased at a chapter that fell in the middle of the story—all backstory of my protagonist. My beta readers kept asking about my protagonist. Who was she? How did she end up where she joined the story? So I started to embellish her early parts. I added many chapters developing her character. But the manuscript grew to well over 130k-words and I had more I wanted to say. The only thing I could do was strip out much of the new story to its own book. Thus, a new book one was created.
The COVID isolation was slowly easing as vaccines arrived, and we learned to mask in public. But I kept writing. The stripped-out chapters became an 80,000-word book, but it lacked a plot. After all, it was a group of scenes adding backstory to a different book—with its own plot. I had to create a plot and rewrite the scenes to fit that plot. This became the new Book 1 and clocked in at 98,000 words—a bit long for a mystery, but just about right for a fantasy. The new Book 2 has been rewritten to build the characters as developed in Book 1, and is now just shy of 130000 words. Now, my trilogy is a four-book saga.
During this time, the one-page prologue became several chapters, then a whole book. Then … I had other thoughts nagging at me. Many of my characters had interesting backstories that couldn’t be fleshed out in the novels. So I formed these character studies into their own short stories. Last year, I published the first of these shorts—the prologue that grew to chapters, then a book, then shrunk to a short story—Vakeva (and) the Wizard, and the second one I published a few months ago, Preston, Warlock of the Keepe. I have another one ready to publish when I get the time to go through the formatting process. Two others are nearly complete (in my mind, they are complete, but I need to type them up).
The Wizard Realm Saga is now a four-book enterprise with two complete books, a third at over 70,000 words and will probably close in on 130,000 by the end. The fourth is less than 10,000 but the outline keeps growing.
Stay tuned for details on more short stories and publication of the novels.