If you’ve been around here for just the past two weeks, even, you know that I’m all hopped up about the upcoming Kickstarter release of the 10th anniversary edition of my fantasy series, Saga of the God-Touched Mage.
You can check out the Kickstarter Preview here:
I’ve also put a video that displays the books down below.
So, Much. Fun.
I’ve noted that the project includes reconfiguring the eight volumes into four, and I’ve noted in passing that I think they work better that way, and that the original eight work better than if I’d forced them into the three required for the traditional trilogy that trad publishing pushed (pushes?) so hard.
That is a lesson I learned the hard way.
Because, of course, when I first wrote Garrick’s tale, I was fully in the mindset that I wanted to be a traditionally published writer. Mostly because at the time, there was no path to publish independently. Even when such a path came about, it took me a long time to get to the idea that the indie path was my preference. So when I very first wrote SGTM, it was supposed to be a trilogy. Alas, if you spend some time really thinking about the pacing of the story inside the books, you’ll figure out where that goes astray. To make it three books of roughly the same size and pacing would put it out of balance.
It’s of no little surprise, then, that my efforts to sell the work to New York received weird reactions. Editors and agents mostly liked it, but didn’t know what to do with it. I received requests for rewrites or suggestions for changes—some that made sense, others, sadly, did not. After several years of this, I noted the Indie world had come to maturity. And since I loved this story, its call was like a siren to me. After a bit of soul-searching, I set aside my New York aspirations for Saga and set about rethinking the publishing plan.
Which meant rethinking the story.
I read through it, searching for proper story breaks.
Full disclosure, I originally configured the project into seven volumes, but as seems natural for me, the eighth just appeared at the end. That, however, is a story for another post.
The first two pieces were the stories that became Glamour of the God-Touched and Trail of the Torean. As I noted before, both of those went on to become bestsellers on the Dark Fantasy charts, and that made me very happy.
That said, reviewing these two volumes was the final factor that made me decide to make the 10th anniversary edition into four volumes rather than eight. I was already inclined to put them together simply because what negative feedback the original series received was generally that they wanted the first volume to be bigger, and I realized that if I looked at Glamour and Trail as a single unit, I could make them work as a single arc. The more I thought about that, the more I liked it. But I didn’t want to do that if it put the whole thing out of whack.
Books in a series have a feel to them, right? They create their own beat.
If I wanted to put Glamour and Trail together, then I was going to have to find ways to adjust the others, too.
As you might be able to tell, I was able to do that.
Hence, Apprentice Mage.
Which makes me very, very happy.
You can take a look at it here: