A thread

Hi there, and welcome to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by in this, the final week of January.

All month long, I’ve taken Tuesdays to talk about the stories behind the Druid Novels. The last few weeks, I’ve talked all about the circumstances surrounding my writings of Coetir, Cedwig, Dwr, and Mynidd. And now, we’ve come to the fifth book, the book that will be available for preorder this Friday. The fifth book to be released, and the first book, chronologically.

That made it a challenge to write, to be sure.

Anialych: People of Sand

Last week, I told you a bit about Mynidd, and how easy it was for me to write. I talked about how simply the words of that story flowed off the page, by the time I sat down to write them. Because of that, it was even stranger for me to sit down and find that I didn’t know how the story of Anialych really began.

Honestly, I didn’t know.

No idea.

Zilch.

Zip.

Nada.

Nothing.

In fact, I tried three times to write the beginning of Anialych, each of which failed by chapter four. That’s almost one hundred pages in. I made it that far in, only to realize that the story wasn’t working and I needed to start over.

This had never happened to me before.

I had no idea how to respond to it, what to do with the mass of ideas in my head, that I knew by now didn’t really go together.

Up until this point, I’d known long before I sat down to write the book, who my first person narrator was going to be (remember, in the Druid Novels there is always one first person narrator, while the rest of the characters exist in third). I always knew that character, long before I started. Always. I knew them. I’d gotten to know them.

With Anialych, that narrator eluded me.

At first, I thought it might’ve been a druid.

I tried to write through the POV of the witch.

I tried again, through the POV of a wanderer, Aedan (you met him, last week).

Then, I tried through Delilah.

The final version of Anialych is actually my second attempt at writing the story through her POV. The first… well, it had issues. A lot of them. But by the time I stepped back and looked at it again, this time in her first person POV, I knew what the problem was.

I had too many ideas, too many things I wanted to express, and I needed to boil it down. The story had one thing it needed to do, one theme it needed to tell.

New beginnings—and the decisions that lead us there.

I’ve dedicated the final version of Anialych to everyone who’s ever looked back on a decision they made, wondering if they did the right thing. I did that, because it’s a major theme of Anialych. The world is going to change, and the people in this story are the ones to kick it off. They’re the ones who will first shake the world, first reveal the druids to humanity. If they don’t do this right, a vein of their failure will exist throughout time. If even one thing goes wrong, every other part of the world will feel it.

And I realized that there was a thread in every story I'd already written, a thread I could tug on. A thread I hope you’ll discover with me, in the first story of the druids.

Preorders open this Friday, only at www.RAD-Writing.com/Store.

[love]

{Rani Divine}