In the lead up to the release of Chalice of Caladriai (book 4 of The Arcanium Saga) I’m going to be sharing something special over on Bluesky every week between now and launch day on November 4th. This week, I’m going to let you know what the hardest part of writing this book was.
Let me start off by first saying that, out of the 4 books in the series so far, this one has been the hardest to write as a whole, by far. It’s the mid-point book (so, yes, there are 3 more books to come after this one, for a total of 7) and it’s setting up a lot of stuff for the rest of the series arc and it was hard to weave all that in naturally without it feeling forced. But I am very excited about how it turned out. And, while there is a lot going on (there always is in my books), it flows well and all my little Important Hints fit in nicely.
The hardest book to write so far
Someone on Bluesky asked my if this one was harder to write than book 2, likely because most writers seem to find their second book harder to write than their first one. And, yes, this one was so much harder than Mirror of Wolves. Book 1 (River of Crows) was my first novel, so the hard part about book 2 was that I was trying to prove to myself that the first one wasn’t just a fluke and that I really could do it again, in addition to wanting to make sure it was as good as the first one but still true to itself.
By book 4, I’d already proven that the first one wasn’t a one-time fluke, so that wasn’t an issue. But after all the big events in book 3, I was trying to make sure the characters hadn’t changed too much after 6 months and a major traumatic experience that would definitely have changed them, PLUS making sure the resulting friendship drama was definitely prominent but not overpowering everything else or turning the reader off, PLUS making sure all the important setting-up-the-rest-of-the-series bits got woven in, PLUS this was the first one without a favourite major character in it (the quest to save her is the whole focus of this book), PLUS a new kid gets added to the team which altered the dynamics… and it was a LOT to balance out.
But none of that was actually the hardest part.
The hardest part of this one, oddly enough, was the series of trials the team faces in order to find the thing they need to save their friend. I wanted an adventure that had an Indiana Jones feel to it and thought that would be easy to write, but it was SO HARD. 😂
I wanted to be sure they weren’t things that had been done to death (giant rolling balls of doom or snake pits, for instance), and I wanted them to be scary but not so scary that kids would have nightmares (so, maybe, more adrenaline-pumping-exciting than scary?) AND the trials had to be solvable in a particular way I can’t tell you about right now because spoilers.
So, there was a lot that I was struggling with in those scenes. And they are why the book got delayed so long — I needed to get them right and there were so many rewrites in getting there. But I think I succeeded. At least, I hope I did.😅
And for the teachers out there, the trials section also has a strong STEM component (there’s a huge Rube Goldberg machine!) and at one point, one of the characters delightedly exclaims, “That’s not magic, it’s physics!”
Next week, I’ll tell you the easiest part to write. And, in the meantime, if you want to see the full pre-launch schedule, it’s in my pinned post on Bluesky. 😊
