Intro
Between 1998 and 2008, 11 of my bestselling fantasy novels in the Three
Worlds saga http://www.ian-irvine.com/threeworlds.html
were published, but the last of them, The
Destiny of the Dead, came out in three years ago. Why the inordinate delay,
I hear people ask? Has Ian Irvine retired to count his millions (LOL)? Has he
lost the plot? Is he doing a George RR Martin? When is the next Three Worlds
story coming? How much longer do we have to wait, how much longer?
Reasons
At the end of each big fantasy series I always write something
completely different. I do this for a number of reasons, one being to freshen
and rejuvenate my writing. The problem with writing such vast sagas (the Three
Worlds sequence runs to 2.3 million words thus far), is that I’ve used
up an enormous number of different characters, settings and plot elements, and
the more I write, the more I’m likely (indeed, prone) to repeat myself. Not
that this is necessarily a problem – quite a few writers, who shall go unnamed,
have made a fine and lucrative career out of writing the same book over and
over again. But I don’t want to do that.
Another reason is that, like most other writers, I crave variety:
I don’t just want to write the same kinds of books. And a third reason: by the
end of The Destiny of the Dead I was
creatively exhausted and desperately needed a rest.
Interruptions
Around that time, the opportunity arose to do something I’d never
done before – write a series of humorous children’s books, the Grim and Grimmer series, http://www.ian-irvine.com/grimgrimmer.html.
I hadn’t written humour before, but I really wanted to. It would be a
challenge, and might not work (though I’m pleased to report that it did), but
it was bound to be good for me. And best of all, the four books were to be
short – only 25,000 words each. A doddle, I thought. What can go wrong?Things always go wrong or move around in publishing and my publisher decided they wanted the books to be around 40 K each. Suddenly I was up for nearly twice as much writing as I’d counted on, at the same time as I was finishing the last Runcible Jones book, doing revisions for the revised editions of my Human Rites eco-thrillers, writing a novella for Legends of Australian Fantasy and working on my new epic fantasy for Orbit Books, The Tainted Realm. For two and a half years I was so seriously overcommitted that my life was literally out of control.
Explanations
Writing is hard work at the best of times. It’s doubly hard when
you’re constantly going from one book to another. And it’s trebly hard when
you’re jumping back and forth between different kinds of books. It’s also
extremely inefficient – it can take twice as much work to get a story done
because you spend so much time spinning your wheels.
So it proved. The smaller stories weren’t badly affected because
they could be written and edited in quick, intense bursts where I could remain
‘in the zone’ for the whole book. But epic fantasy novels are a different
matter. They’re so big, and take so long, that constant interruptions really
affect the schedule. That’s why the book was delayed. It was really hard to get
it right, and it didn’t come right until all my other writing commitments were
completed and I could devote several months to working on it draft after draft,
full-time, seven days a week.
In the end, I spent around 2,800 hours writing Vengeance, Book 1 of The Tainted Realm http://www.ian-irvine.com/taintedrealm.html,
instead of the 1,800 hours that the first book of a new series would normally
have taken. But all that work was worth it; I’m modestly pleased with how it
has turned out.
But why are you writing a brand new epic fantasy series, when your
loyal readers are constantly asking for the next episode in the Three
Worlds saga? Have you no compassion? Are you being deliberately cruel?
Excuses
Not deliberately, ha ha! The simple answer is that, having spent
two-thirds of my writing time since 1987 on that vast saga, I wasn’t ready to
go back to it. I didn’t want to grind out the next book or trilogy, whatever it
might turn out to be, full of reluctance and angst, and let readers down with a
story that wasn’t good enough. I wanted to be excited about the Three Worlds and overflowing with
white-hot enthusiasm for the next episode – the one that finally tells what
fate befell Karan, Llian and the children.
Because I wasn’t ready, I turned to 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. The world is rapidly becoming
a snowball planet; most of it is covered in ice and the ice sheets are steadily
closing around the last place where people still survive, the land of
Hightspall which is still largely ice free because it’s so incredibly volcanic.
Though the eruptions have been catastrophic in the distant past, and they’re getting
worse …
What’s it going to be, oblivion in fire or ice?
History
Hightspall, once the island paradise of Cythe and home to the
peace-loving Cythians, was brutally colonised two thousand years ago by a fleet
from the other side of the world. 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 waged war, did their best to exterminate the
Cythians and their culture, and thought they had.
For fifteen hundred years the surviving Cythians have lived
underground in Cython, served by their Pale slaves, the descendants of noble
Hightspaller children once given as hostages but never ransomed. For all this
time, the Cythians' lives have been shaped by the alchymical books called the
Solaces, sorcerously bestowed upon them by an unknown benefactor.
Now Hightspall is struggling under one natural disaster after
another, and both their power and their magery are failing. The very land seems
to be rising up to defeat Hightspall. It’s as if the nation is cursed. Then the
last of the Solaces appears in Cython, the iron book called The
Consolation of Vengeance, and the Cythians know that it is time to
take back their land.
I’ve long been fascinated by the nature of political power, and in
particular how the means of seizing or maintaining power can undermine the
legitimacy of the realm – it happens all the time in history. We’ve seen it
recently in Australia, with Julia Gillard’s government marred by the way her
predecessor was overthrown. In the US Nixon’s presidency was fatally damaged,
then destroyed, by the Watergate affair.
Musing on these and similar events gave me the germ of the idea
behind The Tainted Realm – a once
great nation, now tainted by a deep sense of national guilt and shame about its
own origins, and about to face a resurgent enemy it has no idea how to fight.
Book 1, Vengeance, will
be published in Australia in November 2011, and in the US and UK in April 2012.
The Fate of
the Children
That’s all very well, I hear you say, but what about the Three
Worlds? What about the story you’ve been promising to write for more
than a decade, the follow-on from The
View from the Mirror to be called The
Fate of the Children?
It’s next, I promise you. Honest! I’ll be finished The Tainted Realm around the end of
2012, and I’ll start the story straight after that. At this stage I don’t know
whether it’ll be a single book, a pair, a trilogy, or longer. That will depend
on what comes up when I reread The View
from the Mirror, which I haven’t opened since the series was finished back
in 1999. I’m looking forward to seeing how it reads after so long.
For more on the story, including the first chapters of all my
books, see my site: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi, get a quick answer to your questions, or to enter my Win an iPad 2 competition (closes
October 15, 2011), pop over to:
Tomorrow's post: my long awaited article, 41 Ways to Create and Heighten Suspense in Fiction.
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