In this week’s episode, I take a look back at the DRAGONSKULL series, and discuss what it took to complete a 9-book epic fantasy series.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Questions
Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 165 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 25th, 2023 and today we’re going to talk about how I finished the Dragonskull series with a look back.
Before we get to our main topic, let’s have an update on my current writing progress and some questions from readers. Right now I am working on Silent Order: Pulse Hand. I am pleased to report I am 55,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 13 of 16. I am at the climactic scene of the book, and indeed the entire series, because this is the final book in the series as part of my Summer of Finishing Things, and so hopefully that should be out sometime in September if all goes well.
Once Silent Order: Pulse Hand is finished, I will start in my next book which will be Ghost in the Serpent, the first book of Caina’s New Ghost Armor series and hopefully that will be out in October. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Dragonskull: Fury Of the Barbarians. If all goes well, I think we’ll probably have that out in October sometime. But we will see how the next couple of weeks go.
Our first question this week is from Michael who asked: Concerning the Dragon Skills Series, are you going to do all nine books as a pack? It would be great to purchase once rather than scroll through nine different titles. Unfortunately, no. That would just not be financially viable, I’m afraid. Later this year I am going to put together a Dragon Skull Omnibus One so I can have a nice, big four pack with three books and a short story, both in ebook and audiobook format, but I don’t have a plan to do a complete series bundle just because I would have to charge so much. It would not be a cost savings for you the reader, and it would still be cheaper to buy the individual books.
Our next question is from Guy who asks: Hey, Jonathan. Have loved the Silent Order series and can’t wait to see how it ends. I know I’ve asked this before so please forgive me, do you have any other plans to revisit the Demonsouled series? They are awesome. Also, will we see more of Gareth Arban, another amazing series? Thanks, Guy. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed all those books and answered your question. At the moment, I have no current plans to go back to the Demonsouled series, but I’m not ruling it out entirely. We will just have to see what the next few years bring. In answer to your other question, we will see more of Gareth in the Shield Wars series, which I’m going to start next year, since that is also in the world of Andomhaim.
Our next question is from Justin, who asks: I expected the Silent Order series to go to 15 books based near your past writing. 14 will be collecting the spoiler and reporting back, 15 would be the final act. And answer to that question, I did originally plan for Silent Order to be 15 books. However, as I was looking through the outlines of book 14 and book 15, I thought these look a little thin on their own and I’d have to you pad them out a bit with some extraneous subplots, and as you get towards the end of the series, especially a really long series like Silent Order, you don’t want to be adding in subplots, you want to be, you know, having subplots be resolved as you narrow the focus down to the conclusion and the resolution of the main conflict. So I looked at those two outlines I thought either I would have to pad these out a bit or I could combine them and make one slightly longer book to finish off the series. And I thought, yeah, I’m going to do that because that’s what I’m doing right now. And I think it’s going well and I think and I’m hopeful that readers will be satisfied with the ending to the Silent Order series.
We will find out next month. Our next question is from Rob, who asks: Did I imagine the new Ghost Series, Ghost in the Serpent? I’ve been trolling,but I can’t find it. Rob asked this on Facebook, which has this very irritating habit of not showing things in chronological order and sometimes disappearing posts, even if you looked at them already. But in answer to Rob’s questions, you did not imagine a new Ghost series. After Silent Order: Pulse Hand is done, I will be writing Ghost in the Serpent, the first book in the Ghost Armor series. Hopefully that’ll be out in October and hopefully the audiobook will be out before the end of the year because I have a spot reserved with the narrator to have her recorded in November 2023, if all goes well.
And our last question this week is from Jerry, who asks: How did I miss you continuing on with the Silent Order series? Last I read was book eight. What Happened with Book 9 and did not get published on Google Play Books? The last one I read, Jack retires and lives with the professor lady. Thanks, Jerry. I’m glad you enjoyed the books and in answer to your question…there’s a couple of answers. I had originally planned to stop with Book 9, Silent Order: Ark Hand, but I decided that the series was incomplete at that point and so I ended up writing five more books. The fifth and last one of which I am writing right now. For a while there was a metadata error on Google Play where the series order of the books was not displaying correctly. I believe that has since been corrected and all 13 books in the series I’ve written so far should be available on Google Play and the 14th one I fully intend will be there in a few weeks.
So those were the questions this week. If you have any questions you’d like to have the answer on the show, please leave a comment on my blog or Facebook site. And if I see it and I have time, I will make sure that gets included on the show as a question.
00:05:28 Main Topic: A Look Back at Dragonskull
Now to our main topic this week, a look back at Dragonskull, which seems appropriate because after two years, nine books, 731,000 words, and 10 short stories, the Dragonskull series is finally complete. Thank you all who came along on the quest of the Dragonskull. I hope it was an enjoyable journey for all of you who’ve read it.
So, it’s time to take a look back at the writing process of the series. We’ll do this using the Internet’s favorite form of communication, a numbered list. Note that this podcast episode will have minor spoilers for some of the nine books, so if you haven’t read them all, it would probably be a good time to stop listening to this episode and go read the rest of the Dragonskull series before you continue onward.
00:06:12 #1 Deciding on a New Series.
After I finished writing Dragontiarna: Warden way back in summer 2021 (almost two years ago to this recording in fact), I knew I wanted to write another epic fantasy series. I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I did know that I wanted it to be different than Dragontiarna. If you will recall, Dragontiarna had five main point of view characters over the 10 books, Ridmark, Niall, Tyrcamber Rigamond, Moriah Rhosmor and Third, along with a bunch of secondary point of view characters and writing that got to be really challenging towards the end since it’s generally best to include something of an arc for every main POV character in a book. So after writing Dragontiarna, I wanted to write something a bit less complicated for my next series.
Of the nine Dragonskull books, the first five, with the exception of the epilogue, are entirely from Gareth Arban’s point of view. I also wanted to write a series with a more focused scope and stakes, like in Dragontiarna the fate of the Cosmos was at stake, and you can’t do that with every book and every series. You can’t have the character of saving the Cosmos every book. Dragontiarna sometimes had major battles taking place simultaneously on two different worlds, and so I wanted to write something with a tighter focus for the new series. I thought for a while about starting the new series in an entirely new setting. I do intend to do it at some point, but not this year and probably not in 2024.
Since Andomhaim and neighboring realms is such a big place, I decided to set the new series there and visit locations that we didn’t see too much of in Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, and Dragontiarna, the Qazaluuskan Forest and beyond. So that was the start of Dragonskull.
00:07:52 #2 Choosing a Main Character
I wanted to try a younger main character this time around. Ridmark by the time of Dragontiarna was a middle-aged man and by the time most people reach his age, they are usually are who they are going to be. By contrast, a younger protagonist has more developing and maturing to undergo, which means that there is an opportunity to tell a different kind of story than you can with a middle-aged protagonist. I settled on Gareth as the main character and decided to start the series when he was 17. Now most of us, when we were 17, 1: know nothing, 2: think we know everything and 3: usually undergo a variety of unpleasant experiences to cure some points 1 and 2. Naturally, this provides excellent opportunities for storytelling. In Gareth’s case, he thought he knew what it took to be an honorable knight but he got some of the particulars wrong. In hindsight, I think it took too long for him to develop. If I could do it all over, I probably would have had that pivotal scene at the end of book two rather earlier than it actually took place in the series.
00:08:52 #3 The Villain
The main villain was Azalmora, though of course we had numerous other villains over the course of the series. I actually happened upon Azalmora ‘s name by accident. In the first draft of The First Sorceress, which was her first appearance, her name was Azurmara, and then I was editing and I mistyped her name and came out with Azalmora instead. I thought that sounded much better, so by happy accident I changed her name to Azalmora. She turned out to be a pretty great villain: disciplined, intelligent, and self controlled, which of course makes it easier to write the protagonist, since the villain doesn’t make obvious mistakes, so they have to be willfully blind not to exist.
#4 Improvising the Norvangir
As you might recall, if you read my website for any length of time, I usually outline everything in advance and I did the same thing with Dragonskull. I did however, improvise the Norvangir entirely. In the original outline, Gareth and Company would meet the Ghost Path Tribe of Halflings after leaving the Qazaluuskan Forest. The closer it got to that point, however, the more bored I became with the idea, since I felt like you would just be digging up an obscure point above Frostborn: The Skull Quest.
At that time, I happened to watch a National Geographic or possibly PBS documentary about how the Vikings came to North America , specifically, Canada, substantially sooner than anyone originally thought, and an idea took hold. What if a group of Vikings accidentally sailed into a mysterious mist that was actually World Gate and ended up in the world of Andomhaim? I liked the idea enough that I rewrote the series outline to accommodate it, and thus the Norvangir were born. I do wish I got in the Ghost Path Halflings into the story, but once I had swapped in the Norvangir it seemed like an unnecessary side quest at that point.
00:10:30 #5 Improvising Niara
Niara was always in the outline for the series from the very beginning. I wasn’t entirely sure what her personality would be like, though. Early on, I envisioned her as much more somber and stoic. As the books went on and the character developed, the stoicism remained, but the somberness was replaced by a combination of the love of fighting, stubbornness, and a violent charisma. When Niara is convinced that she is in the right, she absolutely will not back down and will cheerfully fight anyone who tries to force her to change her mind.
I found that happens quite a bit when writing fiction. You envision s character one way, but then you actually write them and they start interacting with the setting and the conflict and the other characters, and they turn out quite a bit differently than the way you originally thought.
00:11:12 #6: The End
I’ve realized that when writing a series, you need to have a definite endpoint in mind. Like, if you’re JD Robb, John Sanford, or Jeffrey Deaver, you can write a long series of open-ended novels about the same detective. But that doesn’t really work in fantasy. The reader expectation is that there will be an ending, a fairly epic ending, at some point. I’ve tried writing a fantasy series with an open-ended plot line in mind. But it never seems to work, so the ending is important both for the individual books and definitely for the entire series as a whole.
I think I arrived at a satisfactory ending for the series. The key to a proper ending, of course, is that it needs to provide emotional resolution to the conflicts previously raised in the story. Fantasy as a genre has a bad reputation for unfinished series. Mostly this is the fault of the publishers, with a few notable exceptions. They’ll contract a writer for trilogy or five book series, and then cancel it after the second book only sells 80% of the copies of the first one. On occasion, it is the writer’s fault. The writer just bit off more than he or she can chew or got excited with a new idea it, didn’t really plan it out or think it through. So I hope the ending for Dragonskull is satisfying, and if it isn’t, remember that disappointing ending is much better than no ending at all.
00:12:28 #7 What’s Next?
Dragonskull is over, but there is more stories in the land of Andomhaim and neighboring realms. If all goes well, I will start on Shield of Storms, the first book in the Shield War series, sometime in the sometime in the first half of 2024.
And finally, I would just like to thank everyone who came along for the Dragonskull ride. I’m glad so many of you enjoyed the books and that series has been my best selling one for the last two years. So once again, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who has read, bought, and enjoyed the books and shared them with your friends. Thank you very much. It is very appreciated and you are the best readers in the world.
So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave for review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
