Writing the Sangrook Saga
After I finished the Klondaeg series, I wasn’t really sure what was next. Between that uncertainty and the birth of my first son, I took a break from writing and tried to regroup and brainstorm. During that process, a start-up small press posted an open call for a dark fantasy anthology. It was a high concept piece, a family saga of a family of evil necromancers with twelve writing prompts to be filled from the submissions process, creating a mysterious and contradictory account of the family history (since the authors wrote each chapter independently). I was really intrigued by the concept, so I chose a prompt and wrote the story that became “The Curse of Sangrook Manor.”
I didn’t win that slot. The publisher did, however, contact me saying that there was a slot they weren’t able to fill from the open call and they wanted me to write it. I accepted and wrote that story. I was excited. I’d caught the attention of a small press, they liked my work, and I was going to be in an anthology. Somewhere in there, there was even talk of a graphic novel adaptation.
Alas, the company folded before the anthology was ever published. So there I was, with two related dark fantasy stories spawned from the same concept. I eventually decided that since I’ve come this far, I may as well write the anthology on my own. That’s the beauty of self-publishing, after all. Now that it was a single-author project, I was free to discard the prompts and generate a more consistent world, history, mythos, and magic system, but I wanted to hang on to some mystique, so many things go unexplained. In fact, I let the Dark Souls games influence my storytelling. Much of the history and the connections between chapters are left for the reader to infer; even the timeline of the chapters is a puzzle for interested readers to solve.
I adapted both existing stories to fit this new world, released “The Curse of Sangrook Manor” as a stand-alone, and got to work creating five more stories in that world, for a total of seven chapters of “The Sangrook Saga,” each dealing out a miserable fate to a new victim of the Sangrook clan, which taken together tell the dark history in of world reeling from a War of the Gods and the forces trying to bring order to it. I’m not sure if it’s better to call it an anthology or an oddly-structured novel, but I hope you’ll be interested in delving in and exploring it with me.
“The Sangrook Saga” releases on Kindle and paperback on June 22, 2018.
The Sangrook Saga
I didn’t win that slot. The publisher did, however, contact me saying that there was a slot they weren’t able to fill from the open call and they wanted me to write it. I accepted and wrote that story. I was excited. I’d caught the attention of a small press, they liked my work, and I was going to be in an anthology. Somewhere in there, there was even talk of a graphic novel adaptation.
Alas, the company folded before the anthology was ever published. So there I was, with two related dark fantasy stories spawned from the same concept. I eventually decided that since I’ve come this far, I may as well write the anthology on my own. That’s the beauty of self-publishing, after all. Now that it was a single-author project, I was free to discard the prompts and generate a more consistent world, history, mythos, and magic system, but I wanted to hang on to some mystique, so many things go unexplained. In fact, I let the Dark Souls games influence my storytelling. Much of the history and the connections between chapters are left for the reader to infer; even the timeline of the chapters is a puzzle for interested readers to solve.
I adapted both existing stories to fit this new world, released “The Curse of Sangrook Manor” as a stand-alone, and got to work creating five more stories in that world, for a total of seven chapters of “The Sangrook Saga,” each dealing out a miserable fate to a new victim of the Sangrook clan, which taken together tell the dark history in of world reeling from a War of the Gods and the forces trying to bring order to it. I’m not sure if it’s better to call it an anthology or an oddly-structured novel, but I hope you’ll be interested in delving in and exploring it with me.
“The Sangrook Saga” releases on Kindle and paperback on June 22, 2018.
The Sangrook Saga
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