broken_moons | Entries tagged with prince thief emperor

Right, if I talk about scheduling a release-day post to go live while I'm away, it would help if I actually prepared something in time. Well, last-minute is still technically on time.

That said, my idea for these posts was not to talk about The Prince, the Thief, and the Shadow Emperor so much that you don't need to read the book anymore. But I do want to talk a little bit about the world itself.

TP world

You can't really tell from PTSE, but this is quite a large world. Two Princes deals a little more with Imria, Melceira's closest neighbour, and Jade is set in the Ananthai Empire, but as you can see from this map there's loads more. I have one story planned that takes place in Imria itself and a few ideas for stories in some of these other countries, most of them not related to the events in PTSE, Two Princes or Jade (what I like to call the Warmonger series, since all of them deal with the fallout of the Melceiran civil war in some extent).

I am drawing heavily from real Earth cultures in building this world: Melceira itself is a slavic/celtic mix, which, in-world, was actually caused by Emperor Naghnall's conquests; Anantha is based on India; Sin-Kiang on China; Velletri on Mediterranean cultures; and so on. I'm also liberally mixing-and-matching, and with every story I write this world becomes more developed. In the end I'd like to have a big series of stories in this world, some long, some short, and not all of them will reference each other, but there will still be a link there.

You can get The Prince, the Thief, and the Shadow Emperor here!

Edits are an incredibly important part of the writing process, as headache-inducing as they can be (though if I'm honest, I actually enjoy the process as well; you get constructive feedback, are made aware of mistakes (small or big) you can't see yourself anymore because you've been staring at the manuscript for a million years already, and then you get to work on making the story better).

So when That Famous Happy End, well, ended, and I knew I wanted to put The Prince, the Thief, and the Shadow Emperor out there on its own, I also knew I had to polish it up a little further given that it was already two or three years old. But on top of that, PTSE is part of the bigger Two Princes universe, and I had been doing loads of new worldbuilding between finishing PTSE for That Famous Happy End and finishing the first draft of Two Princes.

Now, this world is definitely a case of 90% of the worldbuilding being done in the author's head, and to put all of it into the story would turn it into an info-dump of massive proportions, so while on the first round of editing I did struggle with how much to put in explicitly, how much to hint at, how much to leave out altogether because though it is important to the world it wasn't important to the story...

And this is the part where an external editor (and not just you without your rose-coloured glasses on) is invaluable. After my first editing round there were still bits where the things I added or didn't add were too confusing for the reader, and I wouldn't have seen those without the extra eye of an editor.

So what all did I change? Well for one thing, this 'verse hardly had any religion, cultural markers or much of a history, and other than setting PTSE in TP's past the first incarnation of the story didn't really improve on that - except that writing PTSE got the juices flowing to flesh out and finish Two Princes.

I'd already had a vague idea that the TP 'verse had a dual pantheon (or rather, Melceira does. The other countries have their own pantheons, some of which are adapted versions of each other) but in finishing TP I settled on a sun-moon basis, with Aodh being the god of the sun, day, life, power, strength and resolve, and, because in Melceira magic is innate and very much a natural part of life no matter how much they're in denial by the time TP rolls around, the god of fire, earth, air, and healing sorcery. By contrast, Alyena is the goddess of the moon, night, darkness, death, cold, grief and mourning, and psi, scry, shadow and water sorcery.*

This is a part of Melceiran culture that was completely absent from the first half of TP and the first version of PTSE. It will be much more evident in the final version of TP, so that meant it had to feature in PTSE as well. I also used the sun-moon dichotomy as the basis for a calendar, certain social events, curses and swearwords, and a system of symbols for the different types of magic, which Melceiran sorcerers use to advertise their expertise (and by TP-time, for the Crown to identify who is a sorcerer, and what they are and are not allowed to do).

Not all of this features prominently in PTSE, since I didn't want to double the length with just worldbuilding. Even so, the result is a shiny, polished and newly fleshed-out story, and I hope people enjoy it! Less than a week to go... *bounces*

*Keeping with the 90%-in-my-head theme, this division actually used to be the other way round, back before Emperor Naghnall's time, when the Melceirans were two separate peoples each with their own deity, and Alyena was a goddess of elemental magics, and Aodh the god of the more ethereal 'psychic' magics... this information is mostly lost by the time of PTSE, let alone TP, but just to show you how much goes on behind the scenes. And yes, I do have ideas for stories in this nearly prehistoric period in the 'verse's history. >_>

Only two weeks before The Prince, the Thief, and the Shadow Emperor comes out! I know it's only a short story e-book, and it has already been in the That Famous Happy End anthology for two (three?) years, but still, having it published on its own has me very excited!

Pre-order is now live, which gives you a nice 15% discount over the regular price. Also, in honour of the release, LT3 is doing a giveaway at their Goodreads group (open until 19 June), and Hearts on Fire is also doing a giveaway (open until 7 June (if I translated their US date format correctly)), so check those out!

I know I haven't talked much about the story itself aside from that it is happening, and I want to remedy that. For one thing, it is very representative of the stuff I write, and the kind of thing I like to read as well - I like a good romance, but what I really like is a nice adventure (not too dark) with a romantic subplot. So when the call for That Happy End went out, I knew that I wanted to stick to that and not write a story solely about a relationship. Nothing wrong with that, though! It's just not where my heart lies.

So Ilya makes his decisions not just because he has the hots for Vasiliy (because he totally does) but mainly because there is something fishy going on and he can't abide that. It's not just Ilya, either: the battle sorcerers are something in between a military and an elite police task force, and smoking out trouble is what they do (sometimes literally, ha!).

The other reason to write PTSE (and to write it the way I did) was to use it to flesh out some worldbuilding for my story Two Princes, which had been stuck for a few years by that point, and I hoped that writing something different but related would get the juices flowing again. And it worked! Writing PTSE helped me finish Two Princes, though of course then I had to go back and edit the shit out of it due to all the worldbuilding I did for PTSE that wasn't in the early parts for Two Princes yet...

But this was supposed to be about PTSE. ^_^; I wanted it to take place in TP's past, because I hadn't been entirely sure about how the battle sorcerers had even worked before they were banned, and what better way to fix that than write about an actual battle sorcerer in action? As for the plot, I drew heavily from the Russian legend of Ilya Muromets, especially for Ilya's background. People have described it as an adventure/fairytale, and that's... because it pretty much is. ^___^

Worldbuilding aside, PTSE is not at all spoilerish for Two Princes or anything else I write in that 'verse, which made it perfect for the anthology and as a standalone both. Eventually, I aim to have a whole series of stories in this world: PTSE, Two Princes, Jade, Every Tomorrow A Vision Of Hope, and a couple other ideas I have, with every story exploring some part of the world, some part of its history, its different cultures, and the different types of magic. (In most countries magic is won through bartering or devoting oneself to the gods, but in Melceira magic is innate. Most of the other countries aren't convinced this is such a good idea-and they have been proven right at least once already.)

And now this has gotten quite long enough, so tune back in soon for a post about how the edits I did for Two Princes based on writing PTSE, in turn caused a hefty round of edits for the e-book version of PTSE. This whole 'verse is continually developing, but I've got enough of it down now that any future stories shouldn't muck up the ones that came before...

Or, Sasha is going to hate me for all these long titles. ^__^;

Okay, okay. Remember when I talked about this story I had in the works, Seasons of Gasoline and Gold? And a snippet of a different story, related to Seasons?

Well, I've been working a lot on that lately, in between sewing and editing The Prince, the Thief, and the Shadow Emperor and Two Princes, and the other day I figured out some big things about it. I think we're looking at a full-blown trilogy, here. -____- Seasons would have been a stand-alone, if it hadn't been for one of LT3's anthology calls.

A lot of my stories wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for one of LT3's anthology calls, it seems. I keep using them to write prequels (PTSE, The Shape of Things to Come) for other things I have in the works...

So the LT3 anthology calls are always good for putting plot bunnies in my head, but I'm terribly bad at actually finishing the stories by the deadline or within the max word count. I did manage to get PTSE and Moonwitch into anthologies, but I'm also still working on Is That A Dead Assistant On Your Lawn Or Are You Just Happy To See Me (originally for the PI collection), and Eye of the Red Moon (inspired by the vampire collection call), and finally there's Anything But Light, which was supposed to be in the mecha collection.*

Not only did I not make the deadline for the mecha collection, but the story had moved considerably from mecha to mecha/robot/AI/cyborg. Throw in some (inter...species?) romance, anti-slavery issues, mystical half-sentient power sources of mysterious origin, and a wrathful nature goddess, and the more I wrote the more I realized this was actually more a prequel to SGG than anything else.

I'm polishing up the final details on ABL now and in the midst of ironing everything out, actually deciding to tie it in with SGG rather than the connection being accidental made me realise it doesn't end with these two stories. There ought to be something in the middle, something that does, in fact, tie them together. ABL and SGG are so far apart, chronologically, that the connections are almost circumstantial, so they needed both a common past and a bit of worldbuilding that wouldn't work in ABL to justify the ending on SGG.

And so we have a trilogy tentatively called The Broken God, with Anything But Light as book 1, The Life And Times Of Aran The Inventor (working title, though I cannot promise the end result will be any shorter) as book 2, and Seasons Of Gasoline And Gold as book 3. These jump around the 'verse timeline somewhat, in that ABL deals with the middle stage of the overall arch, LTAI the beginning (though, technically, not quite), and SGG the end.

I put together a sort of blurb for ABL, to give you some idea of what the story will be about:

For generations, Kersten and Vendula have been locked in a near-constant state of war, fighting over control of the heartstone mines near the border of the two countries. The precious blue stone is a valuable source of energy, which the Kersteni use for everything from providing light, heating and hot water to their citizens, to powering the protective suits of their elite forces, the Kersteni Knights; Vendula needs the heartstones for its ever expanding army of automaton servants and soldiers, called Men of Aran.

Torjen Sahl has been fighting to protect the mines against the Vendulans for six years. When after an ambush he finds himself separated from his team, injured and his Knight suit badly damaged, he is rescued by a Vendulan Man of Aran who patches up his suit and takes Torjen to a priestess of Inanna to be healed. All in return for one thing: to be taken to Queen Agnete of Kersten with a proposal that could decide the war in favour of Kersten once and for all...

*Attentive readers may have noticed I called it Blessings of Babylon when I posted that snippet, but I never did like that as the title.

My keen senses detect something... new about Livejournal >_>

It looks nice, I think - clean, modern. The only thing that's weird is how my friend's page is now simply 'Feed' and how incredibly different my actual journal is compared to everything else. Maybe a little pointer next to the 'Feed' button saying 'This is your flist!' would have helped...

In other news, I have been sewing some non-costume projects, and finishing up a story that might turn out to be the first in a trilogy, and I have been gathering pictures people took of me at Elfia, so there will be posts about all that soon. Ish.

Aaaalso, I will be busy with a work thing the whole week that PTSE comes out, so I'm trying to think of a way to promote it that isn't, 'oh look what came out last week'. Livejournal lets you schedule posts, right?

It's alive! Muahahah- *cough* I mean, it's live! Sort of! :D The Prince, The Thief, and the Shadow Emperor was once part of LT3's Famous Happy End anthology, but with that off the shelves now, PTSE (like I'm typing the whole thing every time, lol) will be available as an e-book soon. It's up on Goodreads and on the LT3 website.

While we wait for release day (18 June!), I have a pretty pretty cover to share with you (made by the awesome London Burden).

The Prince, the Thief, & the Shadow Emperor6

The Prince, the Thief, & the Shadow Emperor6

Traveling home by way of the Black Forest, Ilya is accosted by a highwayman who unexpectedly breaks free of his magic by dissolving into smoke. Not a highwayman, he learns later, but rumored to be the malcontent spirit of a despised dead emperor killed centuries ago.

Ilya dismisses the tale as superstition and clever shadow magic … until he sees the thief again in the very last place he expected.

I've come to the conclusion that while I can juggle various stories at once, and have various sewing projects active at once, I cannot actually be in the same headspace required for sewing and writing at once. So, in a writing session I can switch from one story to the next easily, but if I then want to spend some time sewing I run into a mental block. It goes the other way, too, and generally once I pick one it seems I'm stuck with it for a while - so, while I am writing my sewing projects lie dormant for a few weeks, and when I pick my sewing back up nothing gets written for weeks.

This... complicates things a bit.

Anyway, I came here with some fun news, not to bitch about headspaces. ^__^;

The Prince, the Thief, and the Shadow Emperor, previously published in LT3 Press' first anthology, That Famous Happy End, will be available at LT3 as an e-book! With Happy End out of print, I wanted to keep PTSE out there, so that's a thing that's going to happen :D The Prince, the Thief, and the Shadow Emperor is still one of my favourite stories, so I'm totally stoked that it's going to be an individual publication.

Now, for those of you familiar with Two Princes but not PTSE, this story takes place in the same world, though a couple hundred years before the events of TP, and so it is 100% spoiler-free while still being part of the bigger picture for this world.

Also, for those of you who have the anthology, I am taking this opportunity to polish up some details about the worldbuilding, things that have come up in the three years since this story was written, while finishing and editing Two Princes. No plot has been changed, but the worldbuilding will be more detailed, and more in line with what little about Melceira's history is mentioned in Two Princes. Or will be mentioned in Two Princes, given that the chapters here on LJ are even older than PTSE is.

Also, I finally caved and made a map for Two Princes. Actually, that isn't quite right - I've been wanting to make a map for a while now, but I suck at just putting down shapes for continents and countries myself, so I have been searching for the right shape. I found it in an image of something called Pangaea Ultima, a possible outcome for the next big supercontinent. There are many different versions of this hypothetical continent, but I picked this one because after I turned it around, the eastern edge was almost a perfect match for how I pictured the Empire of Anantha.

So then this happened:
TP world

It's... a very global map, and obviously it is not to the same scale as the real Pangaea Ultima would be, or Imria and its direct neighbours would be mostly desert. Also, while this shows there are more countries in this world than Melceira, Imria and Anantha, the names, locations and even existence of most of the others are still tentative. There may or may not be stories about them at any point in the future.

Also, I did not include any rivers yet, or forests or farmland or wetlands or deltas or whatever. The colours are mostly to indicate altitude, and not how actually green or fertile a region is. I'm not a cartographer or a geologist, so if this looks totally implausible, too bad. :P

Aaand now I'm back to polishing off PTSE. Just two more notes to go...

Now, I know I only just posted on my to-do list for the year, and already I have an extra item to add to the list! I was re-reading The Prince, the Thief, and the Shadow Emperor when I realized I wanted to do a sequel featuring Katarina, the healer who patches up Ilya's leg in the beginning, and Sara, the young sorceress who is mentioned to be Vasily's friend but never appears.

I'm thinking... something along the lines of this:

Carnage, was really the only way to describe it. Katarina could feel the onslaught of it, her senses flaring and her limbs aching, feeling broken and torn and burned. She rubbed her arms to reassure herself that she was whole and well, and it was only the projections of all the injured around her, breathing slowly and deeply to find that part of herself that could not be affected and keep hold of it.

The healers they had brought with them from Mór Cuileann had already gone to work, ignoring her and everyone else who was not hurt; guards and sorcerers alike were hovering, worried over their comrades, their friends, and urging the healers on. Katarina should help, she was all too aware of it, felt it tugging at her insides like the urge always did, but looking from a man bleeding freely from a wide gash on his head to a girl clutching her arm to her chest, pale-faced, to an older woman who'd had half her hair singed away, she hardly knew where to begin.

Except... Walking past one of the uninjured sorcerers she shivered, an uneasy feeling crawling through her skin, settling deep inside. It was similar to the feeling she got from internal injuries, and yet not quite, as though the hurt was... not all there. Looking up at the man's face she found his eyes staring blankly ahead, darkened slightly by a frown. It looked like he was staring at one of the guards, one of the ones with burns, as one of the healers tried to repair the skin, but he was... too still, his eyes too unfocused.

Barely able to breathe, Katarina stepped back and nearly stumbled when she collided with someone. They caught her, steadied her and helped her turn around.

"Katarina!" Ilya said, his face going from worried to somewhat relieved. "Come with me, I need your help."

Numbly she followed him, faltering when she recognized the crouching form he was leading her towards. Prince Vasily had not been caught in the blast, but his clothes were nonetheless stained and messy and there were leaves in his hair. He was kneeling over the still form of a young woman, lying stretched out on the ground. Her clothes were in a worse state than the Prince's, though Katarina couldn't see any blood or actual injuries. Her eyes were wide open, and Katarina thought she was looking at the Prince until she came close enough and felt the same chill she'd felt coming from the sorcerer earlier.

"Vasya," Ilya said softly, joing the Prince in kneeling beside the woman. The Prince looked up, a hint of fear and frustration clear in his dark eyes.

"She won't wake up, Ilya," he said, and then noticed Katarina.

"This is Katarina," Ilya answered the unspoken question. "She's the inn's healer, and talented enough that I think she might be able to help."

Feeling a blush creep up from her neck, Katarina gave an awkward bow and squatted down beside them, getting a good look at the woman for the first time - and sucked in a breath.Sara.

"Sorry about the weather," Katarina offered with a smile while clearing the table. The sorceress looked up from staring out the window at the undending rain, which so far had been keeping her and her family inside the inn a day longer than planned.

"What? Oh, sorry - thanks, I guess?" she said, blinking as though she'd been lost in thought. "I mean, it's not as if you can help it." Another blink. "Unless you've found a way to use air magic to influence the weather?"

"I haven't," Katarina said, laughing. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to disturb you. You just... looked sad to be stuck here."

"I'm not - well, I am - but it's nothing to do with your inn!" the sorceress said and then rolled her eyes. "Sorry, I'm not making any sense. It's just, we're on our way to visit my grandparents, because my nana is really sick, and Papa almost didn't come because he has so much work back home, and with this rain we're not getting there any faster."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Katarina said. "I hope it clears up soon so you can finish your journey. How much further do you have to go?" She balanced her tray on her hip, deciding that the dirty dishes could stand to wait a little in favour of a little human decency. She'd expected the sorceress to have the cultured lilt of a city dweller, but there was a hint of the countryside in her speech, and she decided it fit the girl. Her hair was shorter than was fashionable and just a little too curly to be merely wavy, and Katarina didn't doubt it made her look younger than she actually was. It was a fetching shade of brown, though, framing a sweet looking face and dark blue eyes - eyes which were sizing her up as much as she was sizing up the sorceress.

"Muill Creek," the sorceress said. "It's a tiny village near Droghedda."

"That's... still quite a way to go."

"Yeah. I hope we won't be too late." Glaring, the sorceress glanced outside again, as though willing the rain to stop. Katarina bit her lip and fought an urge to hug the girl.

"Well, in the mean time, how about I bring you something warm to chase away gloomy thoughts?" she offered. "It's on the house."

"Oh - yes - thank you."

"My pleasure, miss," Katarina said and turned to walk away, when the sorceress speaking up again made her pause and look over her shoulder.

"Sara. My name is Sara."

Katarina grinned. "Katarina. Pleased to meet you, Sara." Sara's answering smile stayed with her throughout that night and until long after both the rain and Sara had gone.

"Alyena embrace us - what happened to her?" she asked, brought back to the present by Ilya's hand on her arm.

"Naghnall's foul magic," Ilya said, softly though there was a certain chill in his voice. "I think it's similar to what Agnessa tried to do to me - some kind of web of illusions and psi sorcery, to keep her trapped inside her own head." He glanced over his shoulder and back at Vasily. "I think some of the others are suffering the same."

"Aodh's wrath, what a mess," Prince Vasily said. "Father is going to have my hide, and the Council will be waiting next in line."

"We all knew it might be dangerous," Ilya protested. "And we all knew it has to be done, anyway. All we can do now is try to limit the damage and continue to be careful."

"What worries me most is that I don't want any shadow sorcerers to go in there alone, but every time we send other sorcerers or guards in with them they set off some kind of trap. At this rate I won't have any choice, and I hate that." The Prince broke off abruptly with a glance at Katarina, who pretended to ignore his outburst in favour of looking over Sara. That odd ache was very strong with her, and hesitantly she touched the girl's arm only to jerk it back quickly. She was not hurt, inside, but a sense of wrongness permeated her body, like - like a cage.

"She's trapped," she said softly and didn't notice when Ilya and Prince Vasily's attention returned to her. "It's like there's a, a cage around her that's... blocking us from reaching her, and her from seeing us."

"Good, you can sense it," Ilya said, sounding relieved. "Listen to me. I fought something like this when I went into the forest a few weeks ago and Agnessa attacked me. I think I can help Sara shake it off, but I want you to keep an eye on both of us, to make sure that nothing that happens... inside, will get us killed here."

"But... I can sense it, but I can't see what's going on. What if you both don't come back?"

Ilya hesitated, looking at Vasily for a moment. "I could bring Seanan in with me..."

"No," Vasily said. "I don't want him corrupted like Agnessa was, getting him into that clearing felt risky enough." He paused, sharing a long look with Ilya which ended with Ilya nodding. "Just come back to me."

"I will," Ilya said softly, then looked at Katarina. "Ready?"

Swallowing against the bile rising in her throat, Katarina nodded and grabbed his offered hand, finding a patch of uncovered skin on Sara with her other hand. "Go," she said. "I'll take care of you."