Hey folks,
I hope you’re keeping well. It’s a beautiful day here in Ireland, nice and sunny and the humidity is thankfully quite a bit lower than it has been! This is the second post in my little series in the lead up to the release of the final part of the Blood of Kings trilogy, The Demon Hunter, which comes out next Tuesday, 11 July.
My first piece of news is that The Demon Hunter is now available for preorder. It will go live next Tuesday, 11 July, so only 1 week to go until you can read it! You can preorder your copy now at the following links:
Now for the behind the scenes part!
I’ve always really enjoyed writing the coming of age style tale, but chose to take a break from that when I wrote my Dragonslayer trilogy, about a grumpy middle age swordsman whose best years are definitely behind him, but gets another shot at doing something great. I really enjoyed writing that tale, and really loved the character, Guillot.
When it came to brainstorming out my next trilogy, I was eager to return to a coming of age tale, but… I enjoyed writing Guillot so much that I didn’t want to completely leave that story behind. Out of that, I came up with the idea of an orphan essentially adopted by a group of world weary mercenaries.
That was the seed of the story, but in itself that idea is just an occurrence, not a story in itself. I already have a pretty comprehensive story world built up to set it in, so that was another box ticked. All that remained was the agents of antagonism.
One of the things I really enjoyed in writing the Wolf of the North series was delving into the ancient myths and legends of the Middle Sea world I’d developed, and I’d already laid a breadcrumb trail through these early books, with magic growing in strength in the world once again, after not really having featured for a thousand years. The draugr from Wolf of the North, who appear at the end of Dragonslayer in a different part of the world where they are known as Venori, seemed like the obvious choice for the bad guys.
Now I had my hero, my setting, my opponent(s), all I needed was the desire. I won’t go into that too much, as it ventures into spoiler territory. With that worked out, it was time to start plotting.
Now that I think about it, a big part of writing the Blood of Kings trilogy was picking the aspects of my previous stories that I enjoyed the most, and finding a way to incorporate them. I think this is fitting, as it’s the last trilogy I plan to write in the Middle Sea world for a little while (don’t worry, I have plans for more!). As a result, I had a great time writing this series, really loved spending time with those characters, and had a very hard time drawing a line under this last book. Parting is such sweet sorrow…
That’s all for this post. I hope you enjoyed this peak behind my thinking for this book and series. I’ll have another post about it on Friday and next Monday. Until then, take care!