Cheyla's Bones

Funny thing about Half of Forever is that it almost wasn't published. At least, not in 2012.

After publishing Hollenguard I took a break for a month, and then I started to work on another project. This wouldn't be a sequel to my first book, but rather an exploration of what was going on in Valice while my protagonists were up in Denshire struggling to get to Hollenguard.

My primary goal in writing a sister story was to challenge myself to write about some morally grey characters. The cast of Hollenguard, as much as I love them, are mostly altruistic and good-hearted people. What was interesting, though, was how much I thoroughly enjoyed introducing the old music academy and The Empress of the Archin Thrall into the story. I knew that, before extending the books into a trilogy (it was never a guarantee that I would. Hollenguard originally had no epilogue), I would have to be able to expand the cast to incorporate characters like her. Otherwise, the cast probably would have started to bore me.

So Cheyla and Vamric were born. I actually had about a third of a book written about them before NaNoWriMo 2011 started and I moved over to Half of Forever. I've revisited it a couple of times trying to decide if I want to fix it up for publication as a novella or extend it to a fully-fledged novel in its own right. This is the reason why early on in Half of Forever these two characters are introduced, and why there is also a bit of a connection shared between Cheyla and Kamil. They meet in Chapter 2 of Cheyla's Bones.

The main reason I'm writing this blog post is that I revisited Cheyla's Bones again last night. I was so enamored with the story that I decided I would add on to it. I'm going to extend the story, do some revising, and release it as my next novel.