Why I Wrote VENGEANCE
Ancient History
Why am I writing a brand new epic fantasy series when my long-suffering readers are constantly asking for the next episode in the Three Worlds saga?
I’ve spent two-thirds of my writing life on that 11-book sequence, and by the time I finished the last book, The Destiny of the Dead, in 2008, I was creatively exhausted. I didn’t want to grind out another series, full of reluctance and angst, and let my readers down with a story that wasn’t good enough. When I do write the next episode – the one that finally tells what fate befell Karan and Llian after The Way Between the Worlds – I want to be white-hot with enthusiasm.
Also, at the end of each big fantasy series I like to write something completely different, so as to freshen and rejuvenate my writing.
Inspirations
Three years ago I began The Tainted Realm, a new epic fantasy series set in an entirely new fantasy world. Or at least, a small part of a new world. Most of the world is covered in ice and it’s steadily closing around the last place where people still survive, the island of Hightspall, which is still ice free because it’s so incredibly volcanic. Though the eruptions have been catastrophic in the distant past, and they’re getting worse …
Hightspall, once home to the peace-loving Cythians, was brutally colonised two thousand years ago. The colonists were led by a band of Herovians, a supremacist race whose ancient sourcebook, the Immortal Text, told them that the land was theirs by right. The Herovians did their best to exterminate the Cythians and their culture, and thought they had … (more…)