The Men of Therreth
A brief introduction to the male romantic leads of Rissa Must Die, Forbidden Ember, and The Acolyte's Heresy and how I wrote them to be multidimensional by 1) giving them their own flaw to work on, 2) setting them at cross-purpose to the female lead, and 3) showing them from multiple female perspectives. Bonus: they're all feminists!
Pacing: Punctuated Equilibrium
Slow burn or page turner - or both at different times? Or why pacing is so tricky to get right in my work, and the challenges of reconciling beta reader feedback that wants faster progress in the character arc and my desire to keep the transformation realistic and authentic.
Reading for Comparison
10 books I read to better understand how to comp my novels! In conclusion, Tess of the Road and The Sacred Space Between are the best comparisons thematically, while The Jasmine Throne, The Unbroken, and King of Scars are the best comparisons for the scale of the plot and intricacy of the political, theological, and magical world building.
How It Begins…
It always starts with a death, plot-wise, and always the character arc, plotting-wise. Before any other plot element, I need to know how the POV characters are transforming. Because the plot is how the character is forced to transform. Once I hone in on that arc of transformation, really, the climax scene, then I build the rest of the story around getting my POV characters to that point.
Tropes and Triggers
It is very difficult to categorize my novels in a sub-genre within fantasy when it has a lot more character interiority than high/epic fantasy, but also more worldbuilding than cozy fantasy. However, what I can say definitively is that it is not romantasy or grimdark. Therefore, the title of the blog post is a little misleading – I just wanted to talk about how I deal with sex and mental health in my novels.
Diversity and Inclusion in My World
There are a couple caveats I want to lay out as quickly as possible about how diversity and inclusion plays out in my world, including: race and skin color, sexual orientation, religion, age, class and education. These can be tricky topics, and I am open to learning from you and others about how to approach these issues better in my novels.
My 7 Types of Readers
I am not here to please everyone. It is more important for me to find the readers my work appeals to than to try to make my novels appeal to everyone. So, I am going to spend a little bit of time breaking down each of the seven types of my readers (based on faith-curiosity, feminism, and fantasy-loving) and you can judge for yourselves whether you should give my novels a chance or not.