Mike Jansen's Blog: The Chronicler - Posts Tagged "mercenary"

I'm happy to announce the arrival of my debut novel, The Failing God, first in a five part Epic Fantasy series that may remind readers of works by GRRM, Robert Jordan, Steven Erikson or Glen Cook and most likely, hopefully, an interesting mix of the aforementioned. It's now available in print through Amazon as well as ebook for kindle and as ebook for various other retailers through Smashwords.

The series is originally in Dutch, which is of course my natural first language, but during the past years I've learned enough to be able to write the series in English. If I wanted to, I could. But I won't. I started this in Dutch, some of the mind sets you'll encounter in the tales I tell are unique to the area and I want to keep the voices of the main characters intact. That means my translator, Joy Phillips, will have some more translating to do. At least another four books then. Those books, in order, will be "In Shadows of Times Past", "The Absent Light", "Crown Cities War" and "Cold Iron's Truth", or whichever translation my translator comes up with for the last two books.

Writing the original novel, with all the background material previously collected and all the research I did before, actually took about two months. Editing and polishing took another few months, after which the novel was published. Going through a translation phase is something completely different, involving lots of back-and-forth with the translator to get the exact feeling and meaning across. It takes a lot more time than writing the story itself. To get the proper perspective, the sequel took more than fourteen weeks to write. Yes, it's bigger, but it also needed to be consistent, in line with the first book while maintaining the overall plot arc. As you progress through the books it gets increasingly harder to keep all the different details, story lines, character developments and plot elements in your mind. That's why - apart from a busy life and many other writing projects - the third part is not finished yet.

For the coming months I've set aside time to spend on "The Absent Light" to finalize that novel. This means I will have less time to spend on other writing projects such as anthologies, contests and requests from specific magazines. Fortunately I've written so much in the last year that I can coast along on all the stuff I have available now. The joy of being prolific, I guess.