Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 24

New Series Update

I wrote a post a few weeks ago with some information on the new series that I’m writing.  I hadn’t been expecting to have any more news for you guys for a while, but it turns out things are moving faster than expected!

As of yesterday, Book #1 of the new series is now about 50% done, assuming that it ends up a similar length to my Alex Verus novels.  I’ve been making much faster progress than I’d been expecting to – when I started the book my most optimistic estimate was that I might finish by the end of the year, but if I keep up this sort of speed, I’ll be done by November.

As it’s turned out, the 50% mark of the new book is also a very natural break point, so over the next week I’m going to add a series synopsis and send the thing to my agent so that she can start showing it to publishers.  The idea is to do the contract negotiations for the book while I’m writing the second half, so that by the time the first draft is done I have some idea of when it’s going to come out.  Of course, there’s always the chance that negotiations will drag out/go badly . . . but in that case, all the more reason to start early.

(This wasn’t at all how things went with the Alex Verus series, by the way.  In that case I finished the first draft of what would eventually become Fated, then sent it off to my agent to be shopped around to publishers.  But I’m an established author now, with a track record of finishing books, so I get a bit more leeway.)

But anyway, with any luck, in a week or so, the first half of this book will be in the hands of publishers.  At that point I expect things to slow down – publishers usually take quite a while to read and respond to new submissions – so there probably won’t be any firm news for months.  As soon as I have any solid information, though, I’ll share it here.

Alex Verus #7 – Burned

(This is part 7 of a 12-part series of author commentaries on the Alex Verus books.  The master post with links to all the parts is here.)

Burned was the second big transitional book in the Alex Verus series, and it marks the point at which the series shifts from book-length episodes to a single long-term story arc.  Books #1-#6 are mostly self-contained;  books #7-#12 are all parts of one much larger story where the end of each book leads directly into the beginning of the next.  

The events of Burned also marked a shift in tone.  In books #1-#6, Alex is a small fish.  He’s not very important in the larger scale of things . . . or at least no-one thinks he is, which in practice means more or less the same thing.  This lack of importance means that he can (for the most part) walk away at the end of each adventure and be reasonably safe.  But this is already changing, and by books #5-#6 there are warning signs on the horizon that trouble’s approaching.  In Burned, it arrives.  

That trouble ends up being pretty extreme.  I think the early books in the Alex Verus series had given readers a bit of a sense of security – no matter what happens, each book ends with Alex going back to his shop and his regular life and the status quo.  By the end of Burned, that status quo has been blown up.  You can sum up the story of Burned as “Alex loses things he cares about,” and the most obvious things he loses are material possessions.  First is his mist cloak, signifying that he’s coming to the end of the part of his life where he can solve his problems by hiding or running away.  The second loss (and the harder one for Alex to bear) is his shop.  For the entire series so far, Alex’s main job has been managing the Arcana Emporium.  It’s probably not something that most people would see as very important, but it matters to him – for him, it’s a way to help people in a small but significant way, something that I tried to show with that last scene where Alex advises a young novice in his shop.  When the Arcana Emporium burns down, Alex is cut adrift.  He plays around in later books with the idea of opening it again, but by the time he’s in a position to do that, he’s reluctantly come to understand that it’s just not a viable option.  

The reason that Alex can’t go back to being a shopkeeper is because of the third thing Alex loses, which is his anonymity.  By the end of Burned, Alex is aide to the newest and most notorious member of the Junior Council, which puts him on everyone’s radar – he’s probably in the top 30 most famous mages in Britain.  (Unfortunately for him, he’s not even remotely close to being in the top 30 most powerful or influential mages in Britain, and that mismatch will make his life extremely uncomfortable in the books to come.)  Even Alex’s safe house in Wales isn’t very safe any more – enough people know about it that in a couple of books’ time Alex’s main use for it will be as a distraction for would-be assassins.

Fourth on the list of Alex’s losses is his relationship with Caldera.  Their fight in the roundabout under Westferry Circus breaks their friendship in a very final way, something that I don’t think many of my readers were expecting.  A lot of people were angry with Caldera after reading Burned;  they’d been hoping that if something like this ever happened, she’d take Alex’s side.  Others were upset, and were hoping for the two to reconcile (I particularly remember one commenter shouting “BRING HER BACK AND MAKE HER NOT STUPID PLEASE”).  I was honestly a little surprised at both reactions.  I thought I’d made it clear from the very beginning that Caldera was a by-the-book cop.  She’s loyal to the law, to the Keepers, and to the Council, in that order – yes, she’s friends with Alex, but he comes in at a distant fourth place at best.  Alex understands this very well, which is why he makes the deliberate decision to hurt Caldera to save his own life.  Caldera never forgives him for this.  

And finally, Alex loses his independence.  One of the most important conversations in the series takes place early in Burned, where Arachne tells Alex that he has three choices:  align with a greater power, become a greater power, or die.  Burned ends with Alex being forced into the first option, in the form of becoming Morden’s aide, but he doesn’t do so willingly.  He won’t fully commit to one of those three choices until the events of book #10.  

Sometimes when I write a book I don’t know whether it’ll be a failure or a success.  Other times, I’m pretty sure readers will like it.  For Burned, I was pretty sure readers would like it.  Burned was a ‘payoff’ book, similar to Chosen, with lots of drama that built on things that the last two books had set up, and I had the feeling that it would be received well.  

It was.  Burned set a new record for ratings, and generated a lot of positive reviews.  I think some readers had been feeling that there hadn’t been enough movement in the story during Hidden and Veiled, and Burned helped restore their interest.  

I did want to keep a few cards up my sleeve, though, and so Burned continued the deception that I’d started in Hidden about Richard’s true goals.  The events of Burned implied that Richard’s objective was Alex, even though everything Richard had done to protect or recruit Alex applied just as much to Anne.  Instead of trying to conceal that fact, I hid it in plain sight – I had Richard make his offer to them both in Hidden, and let readers assume that it was Alex that Richard really wanted and Anne was just incidental.  I had the feeling that most readers would automatically be inclined to believe that Alex was the important one because he was the main character, and they did.  In fact, the deception worked a bit too well – even after Richard explicitly told Alex in book #8 that “it’s not about you”, a lot of readers still assumed that Alex was Richard’s target and they’d missed something!  Even as late as book #10 I was coming across reviews and commentary that interpreted things happening to Anne solely in terms of the effect they had on Alex, when the truth was that they were happening for the exact opposite reason.

There was one final change that happened to the series at around this time – invisible to readers, but important to me.  The year I wrote Burned was the year I stopped worrying about Alex Verus’s future.  While I wrote Burned in 2015 my agent negotiated a contract with my US and UK publishers for Alex Verus #8 and #9, and I think that was when it really sank in that I didn’t need to worry about getting cancelled any more.  The Alex Verus books had built up enough of a readership that no matter what happened, I’d be able to see the series through to its conclusion. 

Ask Luna #178

From: James

Hey, quick question if you’ve got the time:

What areas of magical study are like the rocket science and the quantum physics of the magical world? Like, if a mage walked up to you (in a social setting) and said, “I study _____”, you would say “holy crap you must be smart” and then the mage proceedes to bore you to death talking about their research. Or are there any subjects you had to study as an apprentice you thought were boring and confusing as hell?

Construct creation is the big one.  Just making magic items isn’t too hard, but making ones that actually follow orders and act on their own is crazy complicated.  Apparently you do it by making a sort of duplicate mind/decision tree or something . . . we were supposed to learn the basics of it in the apprentice programme but I couldn’t make head or tail of it.  

From: Jack

Hope everything is going reasonably well. Or as well as it can be with the “Anne Situation”. I had a few out-there questions if you’ve got the time and inclination to answer them.

1. Any idea if Dragons can observe other worlds like the one Richard traveled too? I wonder because it seems like a mage like Richard (with a Diviner Mindset) might want to conceal his plans from other Diviners and creatures with similar abilities by going to a place where he was removed from this world’s flow of time and would (presumably) be invisible to any longer term divination (which I understand is extremely difficult, but it sounds like it isn’t Alex’s forte and he hasn’t had a ton of experience with other Diviners, so his perspective might skew it as being less viable than it actually is). It also would keep him safe from other dark mage rivals and the light council if there were any plans he had to wait on for years until the time was right. Again, a dragon might be a bit outlandish for even someone like Richard to try to go against, but the man is ambitious.

2. Does Alex think Richard values political power or personal power more?

3. Has anyone gone a different way with the “White Rose modifications?” Like, historically, have life and mind mages ever collaborated to turn ordinary humans into souped up footsoldiers? Seems like something that might appeal to dark mages.

4. Do you think Harvesting’s drawbacks(aside from being super evil) are related to the ones you get from using Elsewhere to change your magic type? Also, is it possible harvesting’s ability to create an (insane) mage with two magic types is because it copies the personality of the victim onto the harvester’s mind? It would explain why it drives the user insane but does actually give them access to the victims magic. Rachel’s experience would support that theory. Along the same lines, could Richard use a mind mage to “format” an ordinary person’s mind and use Elsewhere to cause that perception they have of themselves to shape them and make them into mages? Or could an adept be modified to expand their abilities to a mage of the same type (like you talked about in the spectrum analogy), which would presumably be less invasive than trying to change types all together. It also would give Richard a massive pool of disgruntled adepts to turn into soldiers against the light council. Jinn abilities like the Monkey’s paw had could possibly also achieve the same effect.

Anyways, thanks and good luck!

4. Can a focus become an imbued item as it is used over a long time and becomes attuned to the user’s personality and magic?

Okay, it’s obviously been long enough that I need to go over this once more:  when it says ‘Ask Luna’, that does not mean ‘send Luna a letter the size of Apple’s Terms and Conditions where you ask every random thing that pops into your head’.  If you can’t narrow it down to 2 or 3 questions at most, you probably don’t need to know any of the answers THAT badly.  

Second point:  this isn’t a talk show.  Don’t ask me random open-ended questions about people’s motivations or weird obscure bits of magic theory that I have no freaking clue about.   If you want to know about the Arcana Emporium or Anne or Alex or something, then sure!  But how the HELL are you expecting me to know the answer to things like that freaky Harvesting question?  Do you think I’m going to go do an experiment for you to find out?

From: Dominique king

Just asking for myself actually. Any more romantic relationships that have blossomed in your circle of friends? I hope that they will be fruitful if yes.

Actually, at this point, I don’t think I’ve got any close single friends left.  Which either says something about them all pairing up, or says something about how few friends I have. 

Oh, well, there’s Hermes.  He hasn’t had any new romantic relationships.  I think.  I’m not sure he’d tell me if he did.

From: Ian

1. Are Lightning mages more or less the same personality type as Fire mages? Not looking for in depth answer but is there a general trait that makes them different or similar to one another?

2. Have you ever heard of a Dark Mage named Iram? Recent events seemed to have him/her be a threat on the level of Drakh and Vihaela do you know anything about him like his/her magic type or is this too obscure that only real political interested mages would know?

1. They’ve got a few things in common, but not too many.  Lightning mages are supposed to be quicker-thinking and generally smarter.  Fire mages are supposed to be more emotional and aggressive.  That’s just popular opinion though, I’m not sure if it’s actually true.

2. I’ve heard of him, but only very vaguely.  He’s supposed to be powerful but reclusive.  Doesn’t get involved in political arguments and bickering.  He hasn’t gotten involved in Richard’s war either.  Either he and Richard just agreed to stay out of each other’s way, or Richard tried to recruit him and got turned down.

From: Morgan

Hello Luna. I had a couple of questions and I was wondering if you could awnser them.

Elsewhere relies heavily on intuition. So what would happen if someone like Alex used there divination magic their. Would it lead to nothing? Or would it cause some noticeable change?
Have you ever gone to elsewhere or do you think. About going there some day?
Since Elsewhere is at least partially created from ones own, for lack of a better word, “thoughts” what would happen if a mind mage used there power to connect to someone else’s mind before going there! What happens?
Have you asked Alex about how making magic items with multiple magic types work? What would be the type of item created by mixing variams and Alex’s magic?
Richard traveled to another world for god only knows how long?- Because of time dilation. Do you guys have any guess where he whent?
Alex’s mist cloak works from what I can figure, with multiple times of magic?
Have you thought about making a magic item?
Have you guys thought about making a magic item as a group? Ann and Alex’s magic to give information. You and Sonder to give action. Variams magic to actually do the spell. You’d probably be able to create something like the fate weaver except for the fact that it might be even stronger. Or you could create something like a magical binding item that allows two or more people too unite there magic into one

From: Morgan

Hybrid Mages are Mages wich seem to be able to access more than one type of magic because that’s how they were born.

Harvesting has shown to cause damage to the person who does it. What happens if an unborn baby was given magic?
This becomes two questions I suppose.
If the person dosent have magic too begin with what is the effect of giving them magic?
And if they did what happens to them. Is there personality simply altered by it. Do they come out fine and just have two magic types?
Can they combine these?

That’s not a couple of questions!  That’s . . . actually, I tried counting and gave up somewhere around seven or eight, and I wasn’t even halfway through your first email.  So I don’t even know how many it is, except that it’s definitely more than I have the patience to answer.  I’m not a bloody wishing well, stop chucking in every random question you can think of just to see what you’ll get back!

New Series Announcement

As those of you who’ve been following my posts may know, now that the Alex Verus series is finished, I’m working on a new project.  I started writing notes for it late last year, and I think now’s a good time to give you all some early news!

So here are some bits of general info:

The new project is going to be another series of novels, each of which will probably be roughly around the length of the Alex Verus books.  I don’t have an exact idea of how long the series will be, but if I had to make a wild guess, it’ll be a little shorter than the Alex Verus series, say 5-10 books.  This is very speculative, however.I haven’t sold (or shown) the series to any publishers yet.  So it’s possible that it’ll be rejected, or there’ll be some issues with contract negotiations that cause some disastrous breakdown.  However, if I had to guess, I think the new series is probably going to be traditionally published in the same way that Alex Verus was.The genre is going to be urban fantasy, but the series has no connection to the Alex Verus universe.  This is a completely new setting.

And here’s some info about Book 1:

I started writing the first draft in late June.  Progress has been good, and right now the manuscript’s sitting at a bit under 25,000 words.  Using the Alex Verus books as a baseline, that means I’m probably around 25% done.If all goes perfectly, I’ll finish the book by the end of the year, about a month after Alex Verus #12 comes out.  Though even if I do, the most likely release date is going to be somewhere in late 2022 or early 2023.  Writing and publishing is a slow business!Unlike Fated, this book has been planned from the beginning as the first in a series.  This has meant that I’ve been able to do the world-building first and the story second (with the first Alex Verus books, it was mostly the other way around).

As you’ve probably noticed, this is all very general.  More detailed information about the book will come later – I’m keeping the specifics a secret for now!

I’ve already built up quite a bit of setting notes and world-building, and I’m adding more and more as I go, so once I have a publishing agreement I’ll probably put up a series of world-building articles on this blog, in the same way that I did for Alex Verus with the Encyclopaedia Arcana.  Though they’ll obviously contain a lot of spoilers, so I might decide not to post them until after the first book’s release date.  We’ll see!

Alex Verus #6 – Veiled

(This is part 6 of a 12-part series of author commentaries on the Alex Verus books.  The master post with links to all the parts is here.)

I finished Hidden in the summer of 2013.  The rewrites would take the rest of the year, but as it turned out, Fated, Cursed, Taken, and now Chosen had been selling well enough that my editors were willing to contract for two more books.  The series still wasn’t what you could call a big success, but I did have a little breathing room.  

As a result, Alex Verus #6 was designed from the beginning to lead into Alex Verus #7, since that was how many books I could count on.  My idea for the two books was simple:  Alex would do something to anger Levistus in book #6, who would pass a death sentence on him in book #7 and force Alex to go on the run.  I hadn’t figured out what the “something” was.  

Since I had no requirements for the book other than “Alex pisses off Levistus”, I started Veiled free to do pretty much whatever I wanted, and I used that freedom to try another experiment.  One of the things I’d discovered by this point was that I quickly got bored with writing the same book over and over again, and my solution to that had been to experiment with introducing elements from different genres.  All of the Alex Verus sequels were urban fantasy novels, but they all had quite different flavours.  Cursed was an action thriller.  Taken was mystery and supernatural horror.  Chosen and Hidden focused much more on the characters, and on the consequences of their actions.  

For Veiled the sub-genre I decided to play around with was “police procedural”.  I’d recently watched the first couple of seasons of The Wire and somewhere along the way it occurred to me that the theme of “police who are supposed to be fighting crime but whose biggest problems are all caused by the dysfunctional nature of the system they’re working for” would fit the Alex Verus setting pretty well.  I hadn’t really developed the Keepers very much, so I thought that might make for an interesting story.  

But the problem with experiments is that they don’t always work.  And in the case of Veiled, the big problem was that the events with the Keepers and White Rose weren’t directly connected to the main storyline.  Alex needed to do something to annoy Levistus, but the details of the “something” didn’t really matter, and from a structural point of view, they didn’t need to take up an entire book.  And while the enemies Alex faces in Veiled are certainly evil, he doesn’t have any particular emotional connection to them.   

And so when Veiled came out, it didn’t get very good reviews.  No one thought it was bad, but readers rated it on average worse than both Chosen and Hidden, and I’m pretty sure this was due to the lack of plot progression.  Unfortunately, by the time I realised this, it was far too late, so all I could really do was learn from the experience and move on.  As such, Veiled occupies a weird place where despite being right in the middle of the Alex Verus series, it’s essentially a side story.  Veiled is probably the most skip-able book in the entire series, along with Cursed – pretty much nothing happens in either that you couldn’t catch up on with a one-paragraph recap.  (This would become much less true as the series continued.)

But let’s move on to something which I know many of my readers care about much more, often to the point that it’s THE reason for them to keep reading a book.  Namely, romance!

Ever since Luna’s formal apprenticeship in Cursed had torpedoed the possibility of Alex and Luna ever getting together, I’d been thinking about giving Alex a new love interest.  Alex is the sort who’s slow to open up, so whoever he developed an interest in, it was going to take a while.  The question was, who would it be?

The first possible candidate was Anne, which I think readers picked up on quite early.  What I think most readers didn’t pick up on was that the second potential candidate that I had in mind was Caldera.  And just as Hidden had focused on Anne, Veiled focused on Caldera, and on Alex’s relationship with her.  

Given how badly things ended up turning out between Alex and Caldera, it’s easy to think that any relationship between them would have been doomed from the start, but the idea did have a few things going for it.  Both Alex and Caldera are loyal, and generally honest.  On top of that, they’re both fundamentally ethical people.  Both Alex and Caldera place doing the right thing over their own self-interest and personal safety, which is why they come to respect each other over the course of Veiled.  So I could see why Alex might be interested in Caldera.  

(Whether Caldera would be interested in Alex was another question.  With hindsight, I think the answer was yes, but she’d probably have seen the two of them as having too many differences to make it work.  Alex basically just doesn’t care much about obeying the law, and I don’t think Caldera would ever have been able to get past that – it would have felt to her like a policewoman dating a criminal.  But given how things turned out, this ended up being a moot point.)

After doing “try-outs” for the two relationships in Hidden and Veiled, I picked the Alex-Anne relationship over the Alex-Caldera one, for several reasons:  

In terms of their character arcs, Alex and Anne had a lot more in common.  Both had been taught by Dark mages that they were now trying to distance themselves from, and both had uneasy relationships with their own darker halves.  Emotionally, Alex and Anne understand each other on a much deeper level than Alex and Caldera ever could.There was a distance between Alex and Caldera that never quite got bridged.  There are two scenes in the Alex Verus series where Alex visits Caldera’s home – one in Chosen, and one in Veiled.  Both times, they get into a fight.  Caldera is loyal to the Council and to “the system”, and Alex senses that, and that places an upper limit on how close the two of them can ever be.  Alex always knows that if it comes down to a choice between him and her job, Caldera is going to pick her job, which is why he’s not surprised by what happens in Burned.  For Alex, on the other hand, the people in his life come first.  A relationship for Alex means 100% commitment, and he’s too proud (and has too much self-respect) to make someone else his number one priority when he’s only a third or fourth priority to them.  I knew even in Veiled that Anne was eventually going to become one of the major antagonists for the series.  Having Alex be in love with her at the time sounded like a really entertaining emotional trainwreck.Giving Alex a female cop as a love interest would lead to endless annoying comparisons with the Dresden Files.Alex cares as much about looks as the next guy, and Anne is better-looking.  

As a result, Veiled is the last book in the Alex Verus series where Anne doesn’t play much of a role.  For the remaining six books, she would show up more and more.  

Finally, the events of Veiled have an important (but subtle) effect on Luna.  Luna by book #6 has spent a while learning to duel and to fight, and she’s taken part in smaller combats, but Veiled is the first time she sees what a large-scale battle is really like.  The book doesn’t put much of a spotlight on it, but it leaves a deep impression on her that shapes the decisions she makes a couple of books later in Bound.

Ask Luna #177

From: Kevin

Hey Luna kind of an odd question but since Alex’s magic is for lack of a better word visual based do you notice anything different about him in general compared to other people when talking to him? By that I mean does he appear to use his magic constantly like he’s distracted or is it only when he’s doing things like path walking and other complicated magic?

It’s only when he’s doing something complicated. I know that he uses his divination constantly, but you wouldn’t be able to tell just from looking at him. It’s only when he’s focusing on something that he gets this abstracted look and seems to not be paying attention to what’s going on right now. I get the feeling he used to have more trouble juggling precognition with everything else he did, but over the years he got very good at doing a sort of ‘parallel processing’ thing where he keeps his divination running at a low level in the background.

From: Celia

Hi Luna! Do you still have time for some questions?

When Alex met Will Travis at the casino, he mentioned that Will’s “accent and body language were close to British, but slightly off” and that he had a “faint American accent.” What is the difference between American and British body language?

Thanks so much! Hope you and Vari are doing well.

I don’t know what Alex meant, but I’ve met a bunch of American exchange students and tourists and you do start to notice some differences. There are lots of little ones, but just to pick one out of a hat – smiling. Americans have this way of pulling their lips back when they smile to show their teeth, like they’re posing for a dentistry ad or something. British people don’t do that at all.

From: Sam

Hey Luna!

What’s something you’re proud of, that you never have a good excuse to talk about?

The fact that I got into the Light apprentice programme and then graduated as a journeyman mage. Pretty much every other girl and boy in the programme not only came in with more magical talent and things that they could do, but they’d also had years of training and experience and the opportunity to learn stuff. I was starting out so far behind them it wasn’t even funny.

I couldn’t really talk about it to the other apprentices because it’d be like painting a target on my back – the whole point was that I needed to get good enough that no-one could tell I didn’t fit in. And now that I’ve graduated, everyone just sees me as a mage, so they just kind of assume that I was obviously going to get journeyman status anyway. So there are really only a little handful of people I can ever talk about it to.

From: Celia

Hey, Luna, Any chance you could happen to mention to Alex that maybe Landis wouldn’t be THAT put out if something fatal were to happen to Undaaris? Pretty sure no one would actually miss him.

I would really love to know what it is about our current situation that could possibly make anyone think “hey, you know what Luna and Alex need? More enemies!”

From: Stewart

Dear Luna,

I recently discovered this column and have greatly enjoyed your responses to everything. In a few columns you mention you are more of a dog person and I was wondering if you had considered getting a dog since your curse is more under control. My dog has always been a great help when I’m feeling down and I think you could do with all the help you need currently.

Do you have a favourite type of dog?

If you were to get a dog any ideas on what you would call he or she?

Do you know what type of animals the others in your group like? Alex strikes me as a cat person.

What type of pet do you think Richard would go for? (Sorry sorry I couldn’t resist)

If Richard were to get a pet what do you think his motivations behind naming them would be? (And I’m done, I will get my coat).

I do like dogs, and I do like the idea of having one, but . . . I just can’t face the idea. If anything happened to it, I’d feel like it was my fault. And it probably would be. I mean, let’s be honest here, can you POSSIBLY think of a worse owner for a pet?

Now I’m getting depressed.

Anyway. I like the medium-sized dogs, like spaniels and Spitzes. The big ones are too oversized for the places I live, and the little ones look too silly. Alex probably does like cats, but I think Hermes is occupying the ‘pet’ position.

As for Richard . . . *sigh*. I’ll explain this one more time. I am not friends with Richard. I do not hang out with Richard. What I know about Richard is about as much as you do, possibly less. And if I WAS in a position to find out anything about Richard, I very definitely wouldn’t use the opportunity to find out about his interests in pets.

Alex Verus #12 – Risen Covers & Release Date

It’s been a while since I mentioned Alex Verus #12, so here’s a look at the US and UK covers of Risen, the final book in the series!

UK version:

US version:

Release dates have also changed slightly.  The UK version is still coming out on December 2nd, 2021, but the US version’s release date has been moved up a week, to November 30th, 2021.  (I guess my US publishers really don’t like anyone else getting my books first.)

Less than five months to go!  As usual, I’ll put the first chapter of Risen online a month or two before its release, probably some time in October.

Alex Verus #5 – Hidden

(This is part 5 of a 12-part series of author commentaries on the Alex Verus books.  The master post with links to all the parts is here.)

Hidden was the big planning book of the Alex Verus series.  

My starting idea for Hidden was simple:  do something with Anne’s past.  I wanted to develop the story of Richard’s return, too, but Hidden was mostly about Anne, just as Chosen had been mostly about Alex.  I’d been dropping hints as to Anne’s past in Taken and Chosen, and I thought that this was the right time to reveal exactly what that past was.

Sounds simple, right?  

Yeah, it wasn’t.  Hidden turned out to be an enormous struggle to write.  Counting the first draft, the edits, and the rewrites, finishing Hidden took something like a full year, longer than any book in the series besides Fated.  There were several reasons for this, and the biggest one was that Hidden was the book in which I had to figure out the direction in which the entire Alex Verus series would go.  

Chosen had established that Richard was going to be the big antagonist of the series.  But how was that going to play out?  I didn’t know what Richard wanted or what his plans were, and as a result, in the first draft of Hidden, Richard’s presence was very muted – it’s hard to write a character when you don’t know why they’re there.  Anne’s character was also much vaguer and less clearly defined.  Her dark side was there, but it didn’t show up until later and it was less “dark” and more “ambivalent”.  In both cases, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go with the characters, and so I avoided committing them to anything.  

My editors thought this was a terrible idea.  As they saw it, readers were going to have high expectations for Richard, especially after how I’d ended Chosen, and that having him act like this would be a massive anticlimax.  Anne got even harsher feedback – my editors thought she was unlikeable, uninteresting, and a stick-in-the-mud.

So I went back to the drawing board, which brought me right back to the question I’d been avoiding.  Where was the series going?

And somewhere along the way, I came up with an answer.  I’d tie the two together.  Richard’s ultimate plan would involve Anne, and Anne’s future would be shaped by Richard.  The details of that plan would take another two or three years to work out, but the core shape of the story was set in 2013 and never really changed.  Interestingly, the initial spark of the idea came from something I’d read.  Richard’s intentions towards Anne, and the way the story plays out, is (very loosely) based off the events of a fairly popular piece of media.  As far as I know, no-one has guessed what it was, although a couple of people on obscure corners of the Internet have noticed the similarity in theme between it and Alex Verus.  I won’t give it away because I think it’s more interesting as a mystery, but I’ll be curious to see if people can figure it out after the publication of Risen.  

Figuring out Richard’s plan made things fall into place.  I rewrote his scene, and this time it went much more smoothly.  Anne was more difficult.  I improved her character in the rewrite of Hidden, but no matter how long I wrote her, I was never able to get as comfortable with her personality as I was with Luna’s.  Reader reactions have tended to reflect that, too – Anne consistently gets rated as one of the less popular characters in the series, below Alex, Luna, Arachne, Cinder, Landis, Starbreeze, and Hermes.  Something about her personality just never completely clicked, and I’ve never been able to quite fix it.  Maybe it was that her initial character concept was just so weird that was hard for people to really empathise with her.  Maybe I made some mistake when originally designing her that made it hard for her to become a fully three-dimensional person in her own right.  Or maybe it’s something much simpler – it’s just really difficult to write a genuinely good character (as opposed to a decent or okay character) of the opposite sex.  I find most male characters written by female authors to be fairly unsatisfying, so expecting to consistently write good female characters myself is probably asking a lot.  Still, I’ll keep trying.  

Hidden also dealt with the fallout from what had happened in the previous book.  The events of Chosen had split Anne and Sonder from Alex’s group, but while Alex was able to repair his relationship with Anne, Sonder was another story.  I was slightly surprised at how much negative feedback Sonder got as a result – my readers definitely took Alex’s side, and even the ones who still liked Sonder were hoping that he and Alex would become allies again, rather than seeing them as being on fundamentally different paths.  (Anne also got a lot of criticism, but I think finding out her backstory in Hidden made people a bit more willing to sympathise with her.)  The focus on these interactions made Hidden a more character-oriented book than Chosen.  

As part of this, Hidden introduced Alex’s father.  I think a lot of readers wondered at the time how he was supposed to fit into the larger storyline.  Assuming that you’ve already read most if not all of the books, you’ll know the answer to that:  he doesn’t.  Alex’s father has nothing to do with the overarching plot of the Alex Verus series, and he’s in Hidden purely to show how Alex turned out the way he did.  Judging from some of the reactions I got, I think this is probably a bit unusual in this kind of novel, but I thought the insight it gave into Alex’s character and family history was worth the page space.  Alex’s father has never appeared again – his relationship with Alex is pretty much stuck, so there’s no point.

Being a more character-focused book had its drawbacks.  Hidden was published in 2014 to only moderately favourable reactions – its overall ratings were still higher than books #1-3, but they were lower than Chosen’s, and the tone of the reviews was definitely a bit less enthusiastic.  It wasn’t hard to see why.  Chosen had been a “payoff” book with a lot of high drama and excitement, while Hidden was slower and more focused on setting up future developments.  On the positive side, Hidden aged well.  Its ratings would continue to climb over the years, while Chosen’s would go slightly down.  I think readers came to appreciate the character development over time.

And finally, Hidden brought in Hermes, one of the series favourites.  As a few people guessed at the time, Hermes was a fox version of a fantasy creature from Dungeons and Dragons called a blink dog.  When I wrote the book in 2013, it was a new name, but in 2018, another company called Blizzard created a card called “Blink Fox” for their online game, Hearthstone.  So now if you Google “blink fox” you’ll get a hundred variations of the image below, which isn’t what Hermes looks like at all (he’s supposed to look like a European red fox).  Oh well!  

Favours Amazon Release

As promised, Favours is now available on Amazon!  You can buy it from the Amazon US and the Amazon UK Kindle Stores.  The novella is already available from my website in a Kindle-friendly .mobi version, but I know some people prefer to use Amazon’s delivery system rather than downloading the file themselves.

On the subject of downloading files, my website store has now been up for a week and it’s gone . . . pretty well, actually!  There were a lot of teething troubles, since it’s the first time I’ve actually done the tech work of setting up an online commerce platform, but I think at this point I’ve ironed out most of the issues.  Oh, and speaking of issues, thanks to those people who pointed out typos.  Favours has been updated to version 1.1 with the main errors fixed.

The sales for Favours have been quite decent.  Obviously they’re nowhere near the sales of my novels, but then my novels are released in both paper and ebook versions on hundreds of platforms across dozens of countries with the benefit of my publishers’ marketing and distribution networks.  By contrast, the only people who know about Favours are the ones who read this website, so the only way people will find out about it is if it spreads virally.  Still, I think given time, there’s a decent chance that that’ll happen, and if it does then there’ll be more Alex Verus short stories and novellas to come.

For now, though, Favours is pretty much done with, and I think it’s time I got down to the hard work of writing the new series.  I’m hoping to get properly started by the end of the month.

Also, thank you for those who attended and contributed questions to the German book fair on Saturday!  The Zoom meeting format made it very relaxed and easy to do, so I’ll definitely be happy to go back for similar events.

As regards the blog, now that the release of Favours is over, we’re going back to my author commentaries – next week will be the commentary on the big planning book of the Alex Verus series, Hidden.  After that I’ve got a few Ask Luna posts to catch up on, as well as the cover reveals for the release of Risen in December.  See you all then!

Favours Release Day

(Edit:  Favours is now available in both .epub and .mobi formats.)

Well, it’s finally here!  Favours, the first ever Alex Verus novella, is available on this website as of today!

This is actually quite a big event for me – it’s my first ever step into self-publishing.   Up until now, everything I’ve ever published has been via a traditional publisher.  I’m still intending to keep doing that with my novels, but for short stories and novellas, self-publishing has its advantages.  One big one is speed – I finished editing Favours around two weeks ago, which if I was going the traditional route would have meant that the novella would have come out around June 2022 at the earliest, instead of now.  I’ve also had a lot more control over the whole production process, and it’s been kind of fascinating getting to handle all of the little details that usually get delegated to my publishers.

Of course, this does come with drawbacks.  To set up my website for online sales I’ve had to install and configure a ridiculous number of plugins and pieces of software, many of which have gone wrong in fantastically irritating ways.  I think I’ve ironed out all the bugs, but there’s always the chance that I missed one somewhere along the line.  If you run into any issues, send me an email via my Contact form (which I’ve also had to rebuild from scratch, and which I’m hoping is now finally working).

Speaking of which, you may have noticed that the site has been redesigned.  It’s still under construction, but the majority of the new content is now up.  If you run into any issues, let me know.

One final thing I should mention – somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that I could use this novella as a sort of test case for novellas and Alex Verus short fiction as a whole.  Basically, I’m using Favours as a way to gauge how much interest my readership has in this sort of thing.  If it sells well and gets some decent attention, I’ll take that as a sign that the whole idea of Alex Verus short stories/novellas is worth persisting with.  If it flops, well, I’ll take that as my audience’s way of telling me “stick to novels”.

Now, either way, my main job’s going to continue to be “novelist”.  Now that Favours is done, I’m planning to get to work on my new series:  I’m hoping to start the first book by next month and finish it by around the end of the year.  However, what I do after that is going to be influenced by how things go with Favours.  If Favours does well, there’s a good chance I’ll make a habit of alternating between novels in my main series that I publish the slower traditional way, and novellas/short stories that I can write and self-publish quickly.  Otherwise, I’ll just stick with my old routine of going straight from one novel into another.  We’ll have to see!

And I think that covers about everything.  Go to my Store page to find out more about the novella, and to purchase it in both .epub and .mobi format, or take a look around at the new site.  And for those of you who prefer a more official copy of your books, I’ll be publishing Favours on the Amazon Kindle store next week, on Friday, June 25th.

I hope you enjoy the story!

Additional note:  Since several people have mentioned that they’d prefer to use a Kindle, I’ve made a .mobi version of the file available in addition to the .epub.  You should now be able to download either or both versions from your ‘Sale Complete’ page, but let me know if you run into any problems.