Bloop bloop

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. All month long, we’re celebrating all things druid. Why? Because the next of the Druid Novels, Anialych: People of Sand, is all set to come out this coming March (with preorders opening in February, woo!)! And I’m so excited that it’s all I can think about.

So, Tuesdays this month, we’ve been talking about all the Druid Novels—and Thursdays, well, Thursdays have been the epic day when I share a new excerpt from my latest, Anialych! If you haven’t been around much this month, you’ll definitely want to go back and read what I’ve been sharing.

Today, let’s talk about the third of the Druid Novels to ever hit shelves.

Dwr: People in the Water

Now, as you know if you’ve been following the Druid Novels (or my work in general) for any amount of time, the novels have not been released in chronological order. That means the story, as you know it, hasn’t been happening in order. With the release of Dwr, we come to what is thus far the closest we’ve been to the beginning. Dwr, of course, is the second book, chronologically. Though it was the third to hit shelves. It’s the book that immediately precedes Coetir, and it’s the book that I so badly didn’t want to write that I tried to make it into something else first.

Yeah, you read that right.

Remember last week, when I talked about Cedwig being the real start to the series as a whole? The book that really opened my mind to writing this as a series, and not focusing on Coetir being a beautiful standalone novel?

Well, I was still fighting when it came time to write Dwr. Fighting so hard that I actually attempted to write a different seafaring novel. It’s called The Cauldron, and it’s horrible. Horrible, because the story was supposed to be for the druids. It was meant to be about the Dwr, about humanity crossing over the water and encountering these beings within it. But I really wanted to write something with pirates, and there couldn’t be pirates in the druid world. Why? Because if there were pirates, then someone would’ve been to the Coetir islands before, and that just wouldn’t do.

I spent almost a month working on The Cauldron. I still have everything I ever wrote for it, and occasionally I go back and read it to remind myself that I should never write a book just for the sake of writing a book.

That’s not why I write. I write books with reason, with purpose, not just for writing’s sake.

I digress.

Thing is, Dwr became one of my favorite books in an instant, when I finally sat down to write it. I love it. I really do.

I don’t know how to swim, so I had to improvise when it came to describing things like diving and water pressure, but I had a lot of fun doing it. Once I started writing, I could honestly see everything in this beautiful water world.

And though it was a bit of a mess by the time I finished, after being slightly muddied by my ever-present desire to be writing a pirate book, I still loved every bit of it. Which made it a bit of a pain to edit. But the released version, I assure you, is my favorite of them. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s exactly as it was meant to be. And it contains one of my favorite characters of all time.

Next Tuesday, I’ll share a bit about the book I wrote in the shortest amount of time—and the book that required the least amount of editing, all because I loved it so much that I easily immersed myself inside it.

[love]

{Rani Divine}