The Leap

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. All month long, we’re talking druids. Druid Novels. My pride and joy. My baby. My beautiful little book series that’s finally nearing its end.

As most of you know, Anialych: People of Sand, the fifth of the Druid Novels, is due to hit shelves this March! Woo! And most of you probably also know that it’s not chronologically fifth in the series. No, that honor goes to Cedwig: People in the Vines. Anialych is actually the first, chronologically. It will reveal how everything got to be the way it is now, it will show the druids for who they really are, and explain why humanity is the way they are.

I cannot wait for you to read it! And therefore, we’re spending all month talking about the druids.

Last week, I told you a little bit of the story behind Coetir: People of the Woods, the first of the druid novels to hit shelves. The first I wrote. One of my favorite things I’ve ever written. And the humble beginning that was the start of the Druid Novels.

Today, let’s talk a little bit about Cedwig: People in the Vines.

Cedwig, as you’ll know if you’ve been following me for a while, was the second of these novels to be released. It was also the second one I wrote, though I fought it… hard.

See, at the time that I wrote Coetir, I’d only been writing novels in the Advanced Saga. I’d only ever written books in a series. I really wanted to write a standalone. Coetir was that standalone, for a few months. It was one and done. No more. Nada. "Please don’t make me continue and make this into a series."

But then I saw the Cedwig. I saw them in my dreams, I saw their eyes in the vines while I edited Coetir. No matter what I did, I couldn’t ignore them. So I wrote the book. Which almost turned out exactly the same as Coetir.

Why? Because I love Coetir. I didn’t want to change the story, didn’t want to have to modify it to make it work within a series as a whole. I never wanted that. But it had to happen. Things had to be changed in Coetir, for the rest of the series to make sense at all. And I didn’t want to make those changes.

Eventually, after much kicking and screaming, I forced a book out of myself. A long book. A good book. A unique book, that changed the way I saw everything in Coetir. And a book with so many holes that I dreaded going back and editing it. But it was a book.

And, what surprised me most…

I liked it.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. I was writing this book because I had to, not because I wanted to. And yet, by the time I’d finished Cedwig, I liked it.

But that didn’t mean I was done fighting the series. Oh, no. I fought the next one, too.

Cedwig, however, was really the book that launched the series. Cedwig was the book I wrote when I didn’t want to, the book that allowed a whole series to spawn out of a simple idea I got in the middle of a Viking Mythology class in college.

I’m so glad I took the leap, that I forced myself to sit down and write the amazing story of the Cedwig. They deserved it. All the druids deserved to have their stories told.

Thursday, you’ll see a bit of how their story unfolds—from the very beginning.

[love]

{Rani Divine}