Humble Beginnings

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to the first post of 2019, in Too Many Books to Count—I’m glad you stopped by.

This month, I want to celebrate.

Why?

Because my next book, Anialych: People of Sand, will be hitting shelves soon, and I want to celebrate. It’s chronologically the first book in the Druid Novels, and the second to last to be released (there might be a surprise, between this one and the last one…), and it was probably the most difficult to edit, thus far.

But this month, this lovely chilly January, and I want to take some time to talk Druids, with all of you.

Do you know how it all began?

Coetir: People of the Woods

You have no idea how many title options I went through with my publisher before we finally settled on this one. The idea was to show how unique the series was, by listing them under very unique names. Try looking up Coetir or Mynidd or even Cedwig on Amazon or Barnes & Noble—mine will be one of the first that pops up, because there’s nothing else in that name range. We also wanted to primarily use the bi-line, as a method for marketing the books. People of the Woods, of course, refers to the Coetir. They are the people of the woods, in the island forests.

Of course, if you’ve only read Coetir, you might be surprised to learn it takes place on an island. Why? Because most people don’t think of their large island home as an island, but as their home. It’s not like it was a tiny island.

Coetir had extremely humble beginnings. Beginnings that started in my Viking Mythology class, back in college.

I was a little bit behind in writing a story for my Advanced Fiction course, but thankfully in a class that allowed us to write genre fiction (my Intermediate teacher believed that fiction could not be genre, and therefore refused to let his students explore anything outside pure fiction). Anyway, I needed to have a flash fiction piece written in about two weeks (which was behind, for me), and I hadn’t had any ideas.

Then, presto, my Viking Mythology teacher started talking about druids.

I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I do remember the moment I flipped my notebook over and started writing what I thought was the beginning to a beautiful short story. I tweaked it, lengthened it, and submitted it for my fiction class. But even after that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Night and day, I envisioned the druids. I saw their world, their lives, and how humanity had mistaken them… and I knew I couldn’t stop there.

I wrote Coetir in less than six months, thinking it was a standalone novel. We’ll talk about what happened next, next week.

Oh, and that short story? Most of you probably haven’t ever read it, though it has been published. It was in one of the back editions of Mavguard, and it’s about Ellya, as a little girl. That’s still how I see her, most of the time. A curious little girl, afraid to grow up. And I still write her just as easily as ever. We visit, sometimes, whether in the past or in the future. 

Check back in on Thursday, for the first ever released excerpt from Anialych: People of Sand!

[love]

{Rani Divine}