THE KINGDOM TALES TRILOGY FULL

She required me to purchase some letterpress-quality paper, and I was to write by hand. Aoife-whose story was a sparse subplot in the novel-in-progress IвЂ™d started 16 years earlier-wanted to tell her side of things. And it certainly wasnвЂ™t in the way I expected. What I felt from those involved was almost beyond my endurance.Д«y Spring 2009, I was back at work, but I struggled with frustration, anger, and resistance for this project that would not ease up until the final year of writing the trilogyвЂ™s last book, which was 2016.ДЄt this point, I still thought I was writing one epic novel-not two.ДЄlthough I had a few scraps of Novel #2 written, it wasnвЂ™t until July 2009 that a burst came through.

THE KINGDOM TALES TRILOGY FULL

Those who read The MapmakerвЂ™s War and know how Leit got his scar-when the full knowledge of what happened to him and the child came to me, it was devastating. I was forced too deep into the story at this point. Through the end of 2008 and the first months of 2009, I had to put the novel aside. Readers of The Mapmaker's War will remember the tower Wyl has built for Aoife. And for the next few days, I read everything I could get my hands on about mapmaking. In an instance like this, thatвЂ™s a firm YES. (There would almost always be a dry spell for days or weeks afterward.) The day after I got the dragon image, I was pondering some other aspect of the story, and I suddenly scrawled the question, вЂњWas Aoife an early cartographer?вЂќ and then immediately had an image arise in relation to that. My notebook bears witness to the periods when I was getting inundated with information. The entire cycle appears in The Chronicle of Secret RivenвЂ™s appendix.ДЄnother thing I have no control over-how much. But eventually, that came, and I wrote the cycle in two sittings in late November 2010.

At the time, I didnвЂ™t know an entire myth cycle would be part of the story. I saw a dragon spiral through a mountain, forced up by fire. In February 2007, I was in an evening yoga class when the first image of the Myths of the Four, well, erupted. Not only do have no control over what I receive or when, I also have no control over where. Other times, I'd get a snippet of dialogue or a few sentences. Sometimes, I would see images, and I usually had some understanding of what the images meant on either an emotional or a 'fact' level. Just like it had been with The Mercy of Thin Air, as I read and took notes, I was getting 'flashes' of the story, which I jotted down among and next to my research notes. The first book I started was An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism. With Novel #2, intuition led me, more than intellect, to what I'd research. By then, I already know вЂњwhatвЂќ happens, and IвЂ™m often writing to discover вЂњhowвЂќ those events unfold and connect. Months, usually years later, IвЂ™m able to sketch out the entire arc of the plot, beginning to end. What I call my research and incubation phase (which is actually cyclical and continues for years) is a period when I keep a giant notebook of what streams through-images, bits of dialogue, fragments of an event in a characterвЂ™s life, random linkages-and notes on everything I read which somehow has a relationship to what IвЂ™m working on. My creative process for The Mercy of Thin Air repeated itself for this project.

(Keep the 'second novel' tidbit in mind.) Whatever the story had been was now transformed-I could feel this-and I knew, in a very deep way, this would be my second novel. I still can't describe what happened during the two days I read through every page in that box.

I skimmed some of the writing, then remembered I'd kept all of the drafts and notes in a box, in a closet. Among the folders was one I hadn't opened in a long time, which held the files for the fairy tale and the novel-in-progress I'd set aside a decade earlier. I found the old computer I'd used in school and before. One morning, I decided to dig out some essays I'd written in graduate school with hopes I could polish them up and send them to literary journals. But no matter how much I wanted it to take off, it wouldn't. The narrator amused me, and I was interested in the subjects that came up-the Vietnam War, urban development, and ecology. The novel released Septemand was sold to 10 other countries.ДЄs I settled down after my first book's release, I returned to a short story I wrote while I was in the MFA program, intending to turn that into my second novel. I wrote a short story for a fiction writing class I took for fun in 1999, entered Louisiana State University's MFA program in 2000, turned that story into my thesis, and completed the last draft of The Mercy of Thin Air in 2003.

The kingdom tales trilogy