Creating the Warrior Series
With the release of The Expanse to Donoma this week, book 9 in the Warrior Series, and only one book left to the end of the series, I wanted to give a little look into how the Warrior books came into existence!
This high fantasy started out as a challenge to myself - a challenge of fantasy world building. When the idea first came to me back in 2018, I planned it as a single, epic tale that followed Kahyr through the forest. I wanted to tell her story and rise to the title Warrior. I created three gods, an origin story for their world, a new language (okay, part of a new language), a really crude map that will never see the light of day, and a TON of names that have a lot of hidden meanings.
I usually get ideas for my names from Seventh Sanctum and Meaning of Names (there are a lot of Gaelic versions of words that I use, check out the glossary).
And the more I created, the more I realized that it wasn’t just Kahyr’s story to tell.
There were so many pieces of this story that I needed to include to give the entire feel of the world, and I realized I couldn’t just tell it from her perspective. We had Baeddan and Rhish who served a critical part to play in the elements, and those parts couldn’t happen off the page.
So, with a little patience and a lot of caffeine, I sat down and plotted out my story - all of the timelines and all of the narrators. Twelve different sub-stories within that single, overarching plot line. It could have been an epic, long story of over 300K words, but instead I decided to break those stories into twelve episodes.
Yes, I said twelve. Originally, I plotted out twelve books, but when I began to write those stories and determine the narrator for each episode, I realized that it would be better served as ten episodes total with an action-packed finale.
I made a mistake and never got a picture of this whiteboard in all its glory, so here’s a look at what was originally the twelve book plot along with a photo of my husband and our then-puppy.
All titles came from the original twelve book series, but I ended up cutting these two because they didn’t quite fit the overall theme I wanted the stories to tell:
The Debt of Ciro ended up being part of The Banished Warrior and The Curse of Asalie. The Turn of Ciro was actually cut completely, but it would have included the events of Baeddan marching to Donoma and the early parts of the battle of Ciro (coming in book 10).
There are quite a few fight scenes in this book, and as someone who visualizes before writing, I had some fun recreating and acting out the fights in my living room and office. The first one we see is Kahyr in the forest, and I had to make sure I kept track of how many men were entering the trees, where they were in relation to Kallie, and how to effectively eliminate them without making things seem unrealistic.
After that, we get a few action scenes sprinkled throughout the story, but ultimately it ends in the final two books with big fights, big strategies, and big conclusions. I have a map in my head of all the happenings, and it’s really fun to stage multiple fights in different locations before converging on a single space. Strategizing was the same in terms of keeping up with names, skills, and realistic fights and wounds.
An example of how I planned one of the fights in The Expanse to Donoma. We have all the named characters, their skills, and where they need to be to make the fight realistic.
Of course, nothing brings a story together like a good cover! I had originally created covers for the twelve books, and I even created a few alternatives to use in case I changed my mind later. But nothing made me more excited than finding a model that fit my picture of Kahyr. While I originally created her with green hair (yes, I love a good hair color), I realized that this depiction was perfect without any alterations. So, the green hair from the gods faded and she became the model for Kahyr!
Here are a few of the ‘rejected’ covers I designed.
If you’re curious about some other things that you might have missed in the Warrior Series, you can check out my other Fiction Friday blog post or the Warrior Series page.
