Ideas

Years ago, I got the idea to write a fantasy trilogy, with each book being a prequel to the one before it. The entire thing came from one day, telling myself that history, as it is taught, is full of holes and that our understanding of any given situation is tainted by what we have been told and may be far from the truth. That was the seed for the WHISPERERS series.

The publishing industry as a whole tends to frown at prequels. Prequels are full of writing traps and tend to produce clunky books, which usually don’t sell that well. Here, I never planned to tell the same story in three books, but instead, to write three separate stories that don’t mesh that well together because people living those stories have been told lies; so I hope to side-step the usual problems of prequels. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of take before, and I don’t know whether it will work or not.

The first (in-world, the last) part was told in WHISPERER’S REVOLUTION, where I introduced a world where the Royals are benevolent rulers trying to protect their subjects from the last Whisperer, a madman seeking revenge on the Royals who, in the past, had no choice but to drive the Whisperers to extinction. 

In this first prequel instalment, WHISPERER’S PALACE, we learn that maybe Whisperers were never bad people and that Royals were perhaps the ones the little people couldn’t trust.

The next one, WHISPERER’S SCHISM (this is a working title), will go deeper into the relationships between the two sides and how they came to be.

For the setting, I had to take some elements from our actual history, so the first book should evoke the end of the 18th century, with strong references to the French Revolution. The second book’s setting is more geared towards the middle of the 17th century (say, Louis XIV and the building of Versailles). The last book was initially going to be modelled after the early 17th century (musketeers, anyone?), but that has been done too often, so I’m going a bit farther back, and the setting should be the middle to end of the 16th century and what we call in France the religious wars. Things could change, but that’s the way the plan is set up for now.

Writing

Now, for the more usual bits about these dives into my writing process.

This book “only” took me two years to write, which is both about half the writing pace I had before Covid, and about twice the pace of my last novel, written during Covid. So, there is definite improvement, but I can do better. I have now found a consistent writing window, and that helps a lot.

This book is a bit different from the others I have written: early in the draft, I had determined not exactly the whole plot, but little bits about where the characters were at key moments of the story. This is really unusual for me, as every other time I tried something like that, the characters took over and upturned the original plan—I still remember when I found myself writing in the middle of my first novel a character who said to her sister: “You realise I killed mom, right?” That sentence did have a tiny impact on my story, as you can imagine. In this book, it sort of worked, and no character decided that where I wanted them to end up wasn’t the right path for them. The ending isn’t exactly what I had imagined, but it was close enough, and the end status is about what I had thought it would be. That’s astonishing, coming from me.

The usual “female character” problem surfaced again in a way I had never suspected. The plot called for two female characters: the Royal Queen and a female Whisperer. The plot needed two women, and I was sure no other female character could take over the plot as has so often been the case for me (Neda, the priestess in SHROUDS, with a novel where only gods should have interacted, comes to mind). It turns out that the Whisperer protagonist is a tad young and gets duped too often to be a compelling character at first. Enter an elderly woman (picture Wheel of Time’s Cadsudane), and I have a much stronger character to compete against my Royal lead. This character came out of nowhere and had perhaps a third of all viewpoints all to herself. The story advances because she’s the one doing what she can to make it work. At least, nobody can accuse me of being a Mary Sue with a character who is 80 years old and can’t let two youngsters steal the show.

Going back to the magic system was weird. In the first novel, I had set-up some loose rules, but the magic system was mainly used for battle, because the ones who could use these abilities were never taught what to do with them, so it was only a one-trick system where all you could do was to break into someone’s mind and make them do what you wanted, often leaving your target broken and unable to function. In this second novel, magic is used by Whisperers every day because it is basically their job. They have different fields of study ranging from medicine to psychiatry, and less evident jobs like messenging. I didn’t want to go too deep into how they do things exactly, so this book has more of a soft magic feel than the harder system of the first novel. Maybe in the third book, I’ll go back to a harder magic system because the story will need it more. It was fun, trying to find different uses for that magic system, but I fear I strayed a bit too far into full magic-can-do-anything land. I’ll have to be careful in the editing phase about that.

What comes next?

The idea is that at any moment, I want to have 3 novels running: one I am writing, one I am revising, and one I try to publish (either myself or through a publisher). I’m not really here yet:

• CATALYST (urban fantasy, standalone book): I’m actively revising this novel, and I should self-publish it as I did CHRYSALIS
• WHISPERER’S PALACE (book 2 of the WHISPERERS trilogy): that one will go into revising next, and I should shop it to publishers
• Untitled saga about the Bronze Age collapse: I’m finding ideas for that one.
• WHISPERER’S SCHISM (book 3 of the WHISPERERS trilogy): I still have to find the basic plot for that one.

So, I’m in a position where I have two books to edit, and none to write yet. Maybe I’ll have clearer ideas on my Bronze Age saga, and I’ll be able to write it after editing CATALYST. In that case, I should be able to work on 3 books at once. If I don’t get enough ideas, I fear I will need to edit 2 books one after the other, and I won’t get to write anything new for at least two years. That’s not an idea I want to entertain.