Blog – Page 3 – Kit Campbell Books

Turns Out if You Don’t Have a Focus, You Don’t Focus

Happy Wednesday, my dudes. (Sorry, I can’t help it. I love that joke.)

August has been…unfocused. I am hyperfixating on non-writing things, which isn’t helping but I do find that I tend to do that as either an avoidance technique or because I have too many options for what I could be doing, and then I get overwhelmed.

I suspect the latter, in this case.

I finished my revision for Book 1 last month, so in theory I could do so many things for August! In fact, here’s the list of things I might do this month:

Create a new SkillShare class
Create and finalize all my submission materials for Book 1
Outline and write at least four short stories
Various marketing activities

(Oh, I got eliminated from SPFBO last week, very sad. Though one of the reviewers said he could only get through a couple of chapters, and my book doesn’t even have chapters, which makes me wonder if he read it at all. Alas. I wasn’t expecting to make it terribly far, so not a surprise, and as I’ve learned more about the contest and the types of books that tend to do well, I’ve come to realize that it wasn’t the best fit from a fantasy subgenre standpoint.)

(Also now I don’t have to stress out about that anymore.)

Now, on top of a million things I thought I might do, I also had to contend with the new school routine, which has been rough. (The smaller…squidling?…rides the bus to school, but every five weeks or so they cancel her route because of Not Enough Bus Drivers, and it turns out that two schools plus the loss of the bus makes everything so much worse.) But I think, fingers crossed, that I’ve finally figured it out. Or, at least, figured out when I could potentially work when I’m not hyperfixating on stupid things.

So, what have I actually done this month?

Well, the critique marathon went through this past weekend, so I spent a lot of time critiquing other people’s chapters as well as making edits on Book 1. The end’s reception has been mixed, and one person expressed a worry that the ending might be too abrupt. (Not sure how seriously to take that, as the one issue with the critique marathon is that people get the story piecemeal, and often skip or miss chapters. Book 1 has been through three separate marathons to get all the way through, and this particular person missed the winter marathon and hence the middle of the book.)

With the end of the book in flux, I haven’t been motivated to work on my query or synopsis, which is silly, because the query only covers the beginning of the book anyway and many people recommend writing it before you even start the book so you know what the core of the story is, and even if I tweak the ending a bit, most of the synopsis would stay the same (in fact, I have an old-ish synopsis that I suspect is more or less still useable, just need to find and tweak).

I have messed up every marketing thing I’ve attempted to do this month, which is… a lot. My own fault. Just got to grin and bear it, and do better next time.

On the SkillShare front, I did at least create the guiding documents for the class, and I watched a bit of a different class of mine that overlaps on subject matter a bit to see if I was going to repeat myself.

For the short stories, I have two outlined (one is fanfiction, and will probably never get written, because I have a weird hang up about writing fanfiction. It goes back to when I was a teenager and I decided I was going to write a Star Trek novel. I never really got anywhere because I couldn’t get anyone into character, and I gave up in frustration and decided I couldn’t write other people’s characters, which has, unfortunately, become an ingrained belief that has proven to be hard to overcome over the years.) and a couple more that are vague scribbles on idea that have yet to be gelled into an actual story.

Not a lot to show for the month, quite honestly, though I should know that the critique marathon often doesn’t leave a lot of time for other projects, and I should have known between that and needing a new routine, to try and take it easy instead of frustrating myself.

Hope springs eternal.

How has your August gone, squiders?

Long and Short Reviews 17th Anniversary Bash

Hi squiders! Just a quick note today about a contest that might interest you!

Like books? No matter the genre, we have a great place for you to find your next favorite read!

Long and Short Reviews is celebrating their 17th (wow!) anniversary, but you get the gifts. They’re featuring more than 50 books in all genres from romance to science fiction, young adult to poetry… no matter your reading preferences, you can find something to enjoy!

What could possibly be better than that?

How about a chance to win one of two $100 Amazon GCs, of course! Think of how many books you could buy…

Once you’re arrived at the Long and Short Reviews site, simply read through the book posts each day and answer a simple question (or follow authors on their social media accounts) and you’re entered to win. New chances to enter every day! So, go visit and enter and don’t forget to tell a friend or two. Good luck!

Contest runs from August 19-23, 2024.

WriYe and Motivation

How oddly appropriate on the timing. The small, mobile ones (I should probably call them something else now, they’re no longer small–my oldest is now almost as tall as I am. Something to ponder) went back to school a week ago and I have been spectacularly unproductive.

August’s WriYe prompt is: Motivation – Myth or Muse?

Um. I have no idea what this means. Let’s attempt to unpack. Motivation (n.), meaning the urge to do something (The official Oxford definition says: “1. the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way. 2. the general desire or willingness of someone to do something.”). Myth (also a noun), a legendary story with little to no basis in history or, alternately, just something made up. And Muse (noun again), coming from the Greek pantheon, originally 9 of various specialties, now generally used as anything (or anyone) which provides creative inspiration.

Are we asking if motivation is fake, or inspiring? Sure, why not. Let’s go with that.

Maybe the idea is more like…asking about inspiration. Like, you know, the discourse about whether you need to wait for inspiration to strike in order to write, or whether you can build it by writing on a regular basis.

So, like, is motivation a myth, because you just need to do it, make a habit of it, instead of waiting for motivation to arrive (the muse in said question)?

Motivation is different from inspiration, I would say. Inspiration is “the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative” (Oxford definition again). So inspiration is having ideas, vaguely, whereas motivation is actually being willing to act on those ideas.

I would say I am generally motivated to be creative. I’m often thinking about stories, and I usually don’t run into creative writing blocks. The urge and willingness are there.

What is not always there is the executive functioning. I suspect I have undiagnosed ADHD (and, in true neurodivergent fashion, the idea of trying to get diagnosed and adding those extra steps into my day is exhausting so it will never get done) but have masked for long enough that I mostly come across as a functional adult. And I am mostly functional! I feed my family, I make sure the…squidlings?…get to all their activities and school on time, the house is kept clean, laundry and dishes are done, etc.

But sometimes the act of functioning like an adult means that when I do have some free time, instead of working on my creative goals like writing or drawing, I just veg instead. Watch ghost videos on YouTube, or read some fanfic, play silly games with no real point (looking at you, Minesweeper).

It’s not that I’m not motivated. It’s that I’m out of spoons.

So, I guess, in the terms of the question, I’ll say motivation is a myth. I suspect most creative people, or people who have creative hobbies, are not sitting there on a regular basis and saying they don’t want to work on their projects. Nobody does creative things because they have to. (Unless they’re doing court-mandated art therapy or something, I guess.)

But, alas, that motivation just can’t be realized all the time.

How are you doing, squiders? Anything that works for you when the motivation is there but the spoons are not?

Promo: Dark Walker Series by Shelly Campbell

Good morning, squiders! Those of you who’ve read Hallowed Hill will know I love a good haunted house story, and I’ve got a series today that sounds amazing!

DARK WALKER SERIES

Shelly Campbell

GENRE: Speculative Fiction/Horror/ Dark Sci-fi

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Series Blurb:

When we were children, they told us monsters weren’t real. They were dead wrong.

It’s just a closet door with a skeleton key, but when David opens it, he unlocks a gateway to a sinister world that’s bent on destroying everything and everyone he loves. Some doors are better left closed.

Embark on a thrilling journey with the Dark Walker Series, and be transported into an interdimensional tale of monsters, lies and self-discovery. Where the terror of darkness is real and the line between ally and enemy is as thin as a blade.

“Equal parts coming of age story and otherworldly horror, Gulf probes the depths of loneliness, loss of identity and childhood trauma. It is a true treat for fans of the genre and had me clutched in its razor-clawed hands from the first word to the last.” -C.M. Forest, author of Infested

Book One Blurb:

Seventeen-year-old David is fading from his world, like a Polaroid picture in reverse. He longs to feel connected to something bigger.

When his brothers discover the new extension at the rental cottage comes with a locked door, David finds the key first. Expecting to claim a bedroom, he opens a dimensional gateway instead, exploring abandoned versions of his world in different timelines, 1960s muscle cars alternating with crumbling cottages.

Except now the dimensional bridge won’t close, and something hungry claws the door at night. David scours for clues to break the bridge, but each trip to the other side makes him fade more on his. Even if he succeeds, he risks severing his connection to his own world, and dying on the wrong side, forgotten.

Book Two Blurb:

There are doors that open to other worlds, but it’s no fairytale on the other side.

I thought otherworldly monsters bent on devouring my whole world starting with my family trumped everything. Turns out, I was wrong. My world’s only one of thousands facing annihilation from the maneaters that tried to eat me alive. Charlie saved me, rolled into my life on a motorcycle, and rescued me.

Problem is, I’m the Embassy’s property now. They’re the interdimensional agency tasked with stemming the flow of ravenous aliens into our universe, but they seem more interested in studying me. I crashed a gateway in a way they’ve never seen. The Embassy wants to replicate that. I think they want to use me as a war weapon.

If I don’t convince Charlie to help me escape, I’ll be an Embassy science experiment for the rest of my short life, or worse, eternally trapped in the dark hell that fills the spaces between worlds.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I asked Shelly what the idea that inspired her series, and she was good enough to write me a guest post on the matter!

Guest post:

Fellow squiders, I’m happy to be a guest on the blog today. Thanks so much for having me! Gulf, book 1 of the Dark Walker series was originally inspired by a short story prompt that simply said: there’s a locked door and your main character has found the only key. What do they find beyond the door?

I thought it would be fun to write a portal short story where my character, David, finds a doorway to another world but it’s no fairytale on the other side. Terrible monsters are trying to cross the bridge he’s built, get onto his side, and devour his family. He’s inexplicably becoming invisible in his own world, and he can’t warn his family, because they don’t see or hear him.

The other inspiration behind the story was to play with the idea of invisibility. I felt a bit unseen as a teen, like I wanted to make a big impact in the world I was growing up in, but at the same time I felt too small and inadequate for the task. I wanted to lean into that. What if my main character was actually becoming invisible and they had to save their entire world on their own? That was the idea in a nutshell.

As soon as the short story was complete, I knew this was something I could expand upon. I fell in love with the main character David and needed to give him more page time to tell his story properly, so I wrote Gulf, which allowed me to get some rich world-building and deep character development onto the page. It also posed a lot of questions that (hopefully) readers would want answered.

Breach, book two, expands the worlds, answers some questions—and gets David into way more trouble ? I just finished book 3 to wrap up the series and it will be out in early 2025. It’s been one heck of a ride following David through different dimensions. If you like sci-fi horror, I hope you’ll give the series a try. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Keep feeding those imaginations, squiders!

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Excerpt:

Something that sounds like a dog scrabbling across hardwood jolts me awake. I focus on a low wooden ceiling and struggle to place my surroundings. My legs tingle under a heavy weight, and when I push away what I assume is a blanket, the dictionary slides off my knees and falls to the floor with a thud. The busy scratching intensifies, reminds me of mice running through our hollow walls back home, or cockroaches.

That sounds bigger than cockroaches. I frown.“Shit!” I whisper, scrambling to the edge of the loft, and blinking into the darkness below.

James is standing in front of the couch. A wedge of pale moonlight from the kitchen window ribbons across his back, and his shoulders shudder. He’s shivering. A moving shadow ahead of him catches my gaze. It’s a black hand extending under the door, elongated fingers splayed, claws scrabbling for purchase on the worn planks as it reaches for James’s ankle.

“James!” I yelp.

He shuffles closer to the five-panel, oblivious to my call, but the maneater hears it and rattles the door violently.

“James, stop!” I plunge down the ladder and my feet hit the floor so hard my ankles twinge. Spinning, I grip the couch as I round it, grasping for my brother’s shoulder. I miss, barely raking his back as he shuffles ahead with his hand reaching for the crystal doorknob glinting in the moonlight. “James!”

The black questing hand snags around his ankle and yanks hard.

James’s chin snaps against his chest as the rest of him rag-dolls backward. A thick smack reverberates through the floor as his head ricochets off hardwood.

I scream and jump over him.

The claw twists James’s foot sideways and jerks back, mashing my brother’s heel against the bottom of the shuddering door, deaf to his waking, harrowing wail.

Blood trickles down his foot.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Author Bio and Links:

At a young age, Shelly Campbell wanted to be an air show pilot or a pirate, possibly a dragon and definitely a writer and artist. She’s piloted a Cessna 172 through spins and stalls, and sailed up the east coast on a tall ship barque—mostly without projectile vomiting. In the end, Shelly found writing and drawing dragons to be so much easier on the stomach. Shelly writes speculative fiction ranging from grimdark fantasy, to sci-fi and horror. She’d love to hear from you.

http://www.shellycampbellauthorandart.com

Tweets by ShellyCFineArt

https://www.instagram.com/shellycampbellfineart

https://www.facebook.com/shellycampbellauthorandart

@shellycampbellauthor

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Giveaway:

The author will be awarding a $15 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.

Please use the following Rafflecopter code on your post:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

See you next week, squiders!

August Already?

Good news, squiders, I do have Monkey Island 3 and 4 in digital form, so it’s just the Telltale 5th game that’s currently inaccessible, unless I find a disk drive somewhere that I can play a game off of. (It’s $15 on Steam, but silly to buy a game that I already own. The bigger, mobile one has an external CD drive that he’ll let me borrow.)

Anyway.

July was…wow. A lot. And it sounds like it was a lot for many of my creative friends. Also, too damn hot.

School starts soon, though, and I know my whole family is looking forward to going back to our normal routine. And I need to buckle down and get to work, so I can reach my goals as well.

So, from a writing standpoint, here’s what I hope to get done this month (admittedly perhaps a little optimistic, but when has that stopped me?):

Continue the critique marathon with Book 1 and make changes as necessary (3 weeks left, including this one)
In-person critique group meeting later in the month
Write a query letter and synopsis (and have those looked at by other people as well)
Make a list of agents to query
Outline and do set up for new SkillShare class
Outline at least four new short story ideas
Hopefully write said stories

Ambitious? Maybe! I just need to make sure to focus. But with the school year starting, there is stuff to do–make the schedule for my Cub Scout den and the pack as a whole, learn new school policies and procedures (the bigger, mobile one is starting a new school), go to a whole bunch of meetings about clubs and sports and what have you.

But nice to be branching out a bit. Once this draft is finalized and the submission stuff is ready, I’ll move on to my next project while I’m querying. Nice to be working on something different, though of course once I finished Book 1 I got a ton of ideas for Book 2, but no reason to touch that at the moment.

How was your summer, squiders?

Game On (Part 3) and Monkey Island

Good morning, squiders! We’ve survived all our summer camps and things can go back to (relatively) normal. Phew!

In case you missed it, I’ve set a video game goal for the year to play through and at least categorize my extensive collection of Steam games (much like my ever growing TBR list, I hoard games without playing them, and that is silly).

Part 1 here
Part 2 here

Picking up where we left off:

May

For May, I picked Cleo: A Pirate’s Tale (continued from April), Evan’s Remains, and Phantasmagoria.

Cleo – A Pirate’s Tale
I kickstarted Cleo, actually! This is an old-school point and click adventure game, and I really enjoyed it. Which may have led to some other ideas we shall talk about shortly. Great game, good story. May have teared up at the end. (Category: Beat the Game!)

Evan’s Remains
Evan’s Remains is part puzzle platformer and part visual novel. I got it as part of a bundle, though who knows which one. I played for about half an hour in May, enough to learn the game mechanics and get started on the story, which takes place on a deserted island with the ruins of a technologically-advanced society. (Not categorized)

I never started Phantasmagoria so nothing to say about it. Whoops. Though I do know exactly what bundle this came with. As a kid, I was obsessed with the Sierra game catalogue that would come in the game boxes. I’d read it cover to cover and wish that I could play all the games inside. (I’m trying to remember what game of theirs I did have. Torin’s Passage was theirs, apparently–excellent puzzler, interesting worldbuilding. I have a copy somewhere–oh, and Mixed-Up Mother Goose. Maybe more. But none of the big series.)

Anyway, when a Sierra bundle came up, you can bet your buttons I bought that. So now I have, like, Space Quest, and King’s Quest, and a whole bunch of other games that I always wanted to play and still have not played. Go me.

June

June I set no goals since we spent three weeks on a vacation.

July

July was a smashing success, game-wise. I played and BEAT all three of my games: A Short Hike (started in February), Evan’s Remains (started in May), and a new game called Witchy Life Story which came in a cozy games bundle.

Witchy Life Story
This is mostly a visual novel, though there is a gardening and a spellcrafting mechanism, and you can build up relationships with the town’s people (romantic and otherwise). I guess there were ways to fail though I felt like it was really obvious how, you know, not to. You play a young witch sent to a town to help with their festival as punishment for some bad choices you made at home. It was pretty sweet, I enjoyed it. Probably would not replay as the mechanics did get a little repetitive. (Category: Beat the Game!)

A Short Hike!
I started this game very briefly in February (played like 15 minutes and got annoyed at the controls). See part 1 (link above). The controls were mostly okay, especially once I got some golden feathers which gave me more leeway. (There was still a part near the end where I had to try like 50 times to get it to work, so much that my fingers started to hurt.) By the time I got to the end the game had grown on me, and I briefly considered moving it into a category where I could play some more before ultimately deciding not to. (Category: Beat the Game!)

Evan’s Remains (again)
Man, this one has some story. I’m not sure I’ve been quite so emotionally devastated by a game in a while (though the part after the climax kind of walks back on the whole thing, but I’m not too mad about it). There are a lot of rather long dialogue sections, and the puzzles range from comfortably easy to quite evil, but you can skip any (or all) of them. I ended up skipping 2, one to get an achievement, and one that I messed up and then couldn’t figure out how to reset. (Category: Beat the Game!)

Monkey Island?

Have you ever played LucasArts’ Monkey Island adventure game series? It is perhaps my very favorite series, between the off-the-wall puzzles, quirky characters, and fantastic humor. An online friend mailed me the first game in, oh, 1997 I want to say, but I didn’t end up playing it until a few years later, after I watched an IRL friend play Monkey Island 3 and I remembered I owned the first game. Now there’s….six games?

And I own all of them, though the Telltale Games’ Tales of Monkey Island I may only have on physical media. Actually, do I own 3 and 4 digitally? This may take some tweaking.

ANYWAY I thought I’d play back through the series, starting with The Secret of Monkey Island, which is the first game. It came out in 1990. LucasArts remastered it several years back by animating over the original pixel art and getting the voice actors from later games to do the voices, which is somewhat horrifying, but you can play the game in its original state. (But I do really like the voice actors. Choices.) I’m picking this as one of my games for August, so hopefully I will actually, you know, get around to it.

Play anything good lately, squiders?

(Actually no, don’t tell me, I must stop buying games and I just bought in the Steam summer sale, so….)

WriYe and Ideal Readers

Hey-o, squiders. The summer camps continue to be a disaster and somehow we’re two weeks out from school starting for the fall. Will I remember how much bunching all the summer camps sucks next winter when I am signing people up for summer camps? Probably not.

(In the next 24 hours, I need to go to work, take the bigger, mobile one to a doctor’s appointment, pack people for two separate Scout campouts, take the bigger, mobile one to the middle school for orientation and also probably fencing, and other administrative stuff which must include at least making dinner and doing laundry. Oh, and I haven’t done my critiques for the critique marathon. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.)

July’s prompt: Define your ideal audience. How you do or don’t write to them?

Hm. I feel like we’ve had a similar prompt before.

Ideal audience is something that eludes me from a marketing standpoint. You read marketing books, and they’re like, “Picture your ideal reader. Give them a name. How old are they? What do they do with their life? Where do they hang out? What other things do they like?”

And the theory is you’re like, yes, here is Helga, 36, married with children and living in Minnesota. Aside from my particular type of book she also likes knitting, gardening, and watching Star Trek re-runs. She jogs every morning at 5:30 am and survives on five cups of coffee a day. She can be found on knitting subreddits and a very specific Discord discussing why Jean-Luc and Beverly never got together.

And then once you, in theory, know where your ideal reader is hanging out, that’s where you advertise to, and, in theory, make a buttload of money because you have perfectly defined your reader and brought the book to them.

I feel like there are probably genres where this works great. If I’m writing a cozy mystery series that takes place at a Renaissance Festival, then I can approach Renfaire people, some of whom would probably be interested. Or, like, a sweet romance that takes place at a ski resort in the mountains. There’s definitely places where those two things would intersect.

But I feel like once you get more subjective, where you don’t have a distinct hobby or location or piece of media or something else to tie the marketing to, the whole thing kind of falls apart. If you write fast-paced thrillers set in, oh, Davenport, you could maybe interest the people of Davenport in said stories. But if you write said thrillers in a variety of places, with a variety of different characters, what do you do?

Lots of different people like thrillers. It’s not like only white men in their 50s like them, and even if that were true, you’re not going to find all white men in their 50s in the same place, doing the same thing.

Speculative fiction–fantasy, science fiction, paranormal-based horror–can have things you can tie into. But they also tend to be broad genres enjoyed by many different types of people. I mean, just look at the variety of people who like Star Trek. Or D&D. Or Star Wars. Or Stranger Things.

All this to say, when I try to do this exercise, I get a fat lot of nothing. Unless I assume my ideal reader is someone exactly like me (after all, I like my stories). But that doesn’t really seem to get me anywhere–I’m already hanging out in the spaces I hang out in, after all.

I think it’s kind of a silly exercise, but I’m glad it works for some people.

How about you, squider? Had any luck with this sort of thing?

I Finally Finished Draft!

Hi, squiders! We lumped all the summer camps together in a three week time period because of Reasons and it is not our finest hour.

BUT

I finally finished my draft of Book 1!

Hold on, I’m going to scroll back through and see when I actually started. It looks like I “started” in Feb 2022, which is at least when I dug up the draft and re-read it. And then I didn’t touch it again until Nov 2022, when I re-read it and went over beta comments from the last time it went through the critique marathon, and then I spent Nov-Feb doing all the prep work for the revision (I try to do the majority of the work before I start the revision, so I have clear goals in mind and know exactly what to change).

And I started the actual revision in Feb 2023.

So. 15 months. A bit long, honestly, but I think I’ve talked before about the amount of emotional baggage this particular story always brings along with it. I’ve been working on it on and off for twenty years. It is my magnum opus. Or at least the story I care most about.

(I did take April 2023 off to write a novella, July 2023 off for a trip, and just last month for another trip, so I guess it’s really like a year. Ah well.)

This is the third or fourth time I’ve rewritten it, and I feel like, this time, we’re actually getting somewhere. Almost the whole book has been run through various critique marathons (we’re on Chapter 26 there) where in general the feedback has been positive, and my critique group has also liked it (they’re through Chapter 27. There’s 32 chapters total).

I mean, there’s still changes to be made. I will run the ending through the marathon and my in-person group and make changes as necessary. But I’m also going to put together submission materials and hope that, finally, the story is ready to go out into the world.

Scary! But exciting.

Part of me wants to jump right back in and move on to Book 2 (the oldest existent draft, and hence needing the most work), but logically that makes no sense. No reason to spend a ton of time on sequels until Book 1 goes somewhere.

(The trilogy timeline goes something like:
2004-2005: First draft of Book 1
2006: First draft of Book 2 (abandoned about 20K in, story was broken)
2009-2010: Second draft of Book 1
2011-2012: First full draft of Book 2
2014-2015: First draft of Book 3
2017-2018: Third draft of Book 1
2023-2024: Fourth draft of Book 1)

But yay! It is complete! Confetti and celebrations!

So, what now? Well, submission materials. I’d like to get those done while I’m still actively thinking about the story.

Then maybe a month or two off to work on other things (new short stories?) while I start submitting.

Next on the revision slate is Rings Among the Stars, which is a scifi horror novella.

With all the Nano drama I don’t think I will be participating this year (and unless they get their act together, probably never again) but I may do a new project around that time period.

Hope you’re having a productive week as well!

Oho! (Related to the Shannara Readthrough)

Evening, squiders. Why is summer so hot? Ugh.

I’ve been reading through Terry Brooks’s Sometimes the Magic Works, which is part writing how-to and part memoir, for the past two months. It was written in 2003, and is one of the many writing books I’ve inherited from my mother each time she moves.

(I’ve just finished it, actually.)

I discovered a very interesting chapter in my reading yesterday, however. In a chapter entitled “The Word and the Void” (which is the name of the first trilogy in the Shannara series, and the one I’m currently in) Mr. Brooks talks about the dangers of writing outside the series/genre you’re known for, and he uses the Word and the Void as an example, as a separate series from Shannara.

Yet here I am, twenty years later, and the Word and the Void is included in every list of Shannara books you can find on the Internet.

So I can only assume that sometime between 2003 (when he wrote this memoir/how-to) and the publication of Armageddon’s Children (2006, the first of the Genesis of Shannara trilogy), the decision was made to include the Word and the Void trilogy as part of the Shannara universe as opposed to its own, and that the Genesis of Shannara trilogy is the bridge between the Word and the Void and the later Shannara books.

(Also an interesting note, while the Word and the Void and a few related-ish short stories are included on the lists of Shannara books and reading orders, Mr. Brooks’s own reading orders for Shannara do not include them.)

All my questions are answered. The Word and the Void books don’t feel like Shannara, and have no obvious ties to the later Shannara books, and the magic is all weird, because they were not written as part of Shannara.

I wonder what happened. Did Mr. Brooks have an epiphany that tied everything together? Was it a marketing thing, where someone was like, well, you know, these books take place hundreds (thousands?) of years before these other books, so why not just kind of shoehorn them in? They’re close enough?

I guess I won’t know for sure until I get farther in the series.

Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. See you Thursday, squiders!

Shannara Readthrough: A Knight of the Word

Howdy, squiders. Hope you’re doing well.

I’ve finally finished the next book in my Shannara readthrough (I read the last book–technically the first book chronologically–in spring of 2022. Making excellent progress, she says sarcastically.) and thought we should probably talk about it.

To catch people up, because it’s been awhile, The Wishsong of Shannara was the gateway book that got me into adult fantasy, a genre that continues to be near and dear to my heart all these years later. In 2020 (?) my spouse and I watched the first season of the Shannara Chronicles, which loosely follows the events of The Elfstones of Shannara, and I had the thought that now that the series is complete, I should read through all the books in chronological order.

You see, the original Shannara series is pretty straight fantasy. But as time goes on and you read more books, you go on to realize the entire series is actually science fantasy, with this happening on a future Earth in a post-apocalyptic time period. I read the books in the order they were published so my understanding of how this came to be is spotty.

The Word and the Void trilogy (Running with the Demons, A Knight of the Word, and Angel Fire East) act as a prequel to the rest of the books, taking place in more or less modern day, before whatever apocalypse happens that creates the fantasy world in the later books.

They’ve been…not what I was expecting, to say the least. Magic exists pre-apocalypse, though in a completely different form, and it’s not clear how we get from Point A to Point B. (None of the magic that exists pre-apocalypse seems to exist afterwards, with different magic instead, though I’m hoping that as I go through the books things will make more sense.)

A Knight of the Word takes place five years after the events of Running with the Demons, following Nest Freemark and John Ross again. The entire book takes place over a couple of days, with a few flashbacks. John Ross has attempted to renounce his title as a Knight of the Word after a traumatic experience where he failed to save children, and Nest is sent to help him realize that he can’t give it up, and if he continues along this path, he’ll fall to being a servant of the Void. (In this world, the Word is “good” and the Void is “evil,” and there’s been more or less a shaky balance between the two for time immaterial.) And if he falls to the Void, the apocalypse that is coming will come faster and so forth.

Arguably not a lot “happens” in this book. It is very much an exploration of trauma and people’s responses to such and how we choose–or not–our own identities. Aside from the occasional demon battles and a handful of other supernatural creatures (sylvans, which were also in the first book, and tatterdemalions, which are a strange conglomeration of dead children’s memories), it could be contemporary fiction in many parts, dealing with issues of today. Not that that is a bad thing. The pacing is still good and it didn’t feel like it dragged in any parts.

As someone who read several of the “later” books (chronologically), it’s hard to look at this initial trilogy and see how we get to where we’re going. There’s not a lot of threads stretching between these books aside from the characters and this potential looming apocalypse (which must come to pass at some point). No overarcing plot for the trilogy or anything along those lines.

But we persevere. Next up will be Angel Fire East. I’m not going to commit to a time period on that, because we see how that goes.

Have you read the Shannara books, squiders? Read through these prequels? Does it make sense eventually?