Facets of Fantasy started out as a five-story collection and my aim in publishing it was practicality. At that time I hadn’t yet written a full-length novel (although I would be doing the first draft of the Harrisons the next year) and most published books I saw were long. I knew readers were more likely to buy something longer because they felt more pages = more bang for your buck. Of course that’s not quite true if the content in the pages is just bloated, repetitious, or poor-quality, but they’ll only find that out AFTER they read the book. So longer was more of a sell, initially.

I didn’t intend for the Facets stories to tell any sort of story together. Actually, I didn’t feel that was important. Short story and novella collections were groups of unconnected little tales, after all. But as the years passed and passed I grew to feel there was a similarity in the three stories that are now in Facets: Halogen Crossing, Jurant, and The Amulet of Renari. "The Trouble with Taranui" grew into a longer novel, City of the Invaders. And "Millhaven Castle" had originally been published in another book. The more I looked at it, the more I felt it didn’t really fit into Facets of Fantasy’s personality.

What is great about this is that the 3 Facets novellas have a distinctive tone, so you know if something belongs with them or not. This means they also have a distinctive audience who wouldn’t be interested in other stories like Millhaven. In fact, the readers of Facets of Fantasy are so distinctive they might not enjoy my other work overall. Facets of Fantasy, with its blend of three different kinds of fantasy types, has a tone unlike any of my other books—a crafted, elevated, broad-reaching tone in which strong characters grapple with a deeply structured world to which they belong. It’s a fantasy book for fantasy lovers. And although I write whatever ideas come into my head, I understand that love for fantasy, so I’m glad I have a book for the fantasy buff.

And there will be more updates.

The two Palladia stories weren’t originally written as companions. In fact, the first draft of Consuela had a historical setting and was a filler in between the first and second parts of Victoria: A Tale of Spain. But after a number of years, Consuela quietly migrated over into Palladia. This made me able to explore something we don't get to see in City of the Invaders--the Invader point of view.

In the first book, Invaders are shown as bad. Katia probably feels this way because the only Invaders she personally knows tried to set up her family. But the situation is a little more complicated than good-EC and bad-Invaders, as Miss Plummer discovers in Consuela. Unlike Invaders, EC who are bad have the element of surprise, because people tend to root for minority groups. So Mr. Lazeemboi is able to sneak up on everyone and this time we get to see an Invader's viewpoint on that.

Consuela wasn't needed where it was anymore once "Victoria" and "Alyce" merged into one book, and adding it into the mix of Palladia gave more focus to both it and to Palladia generally. The story is now from the perspective of a young Invader, so it offers some fairness and clarity that balances City of the Invaders. After all, the more we see of the world, the more we notice this unlikely blend of closed-off literati and scummy, drifting street criminals actually have a great rapport with each other. The majority of people in Palladia belong to two groups that have the least possible in common.
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Or maybe they have a lot more to do with each other than meets the eye.

And there will be more updates.

After Bellevere House was written, I realized I had a lot of books published, unpublished, and in need of republishing. For a while, it looked like my writing career had stalled. After all, with such a disorganized backlog of material and no promise yet that any of the stories had much of an audience, I felt little encouragement to continue. So I just spent some quiet time putting those old stories in order while I waited for the next thing to happen. The Bible talks about “waiting on the Lord,” and it’s a phrase often heard in Christian devotionals and Christian living books. But it’s not easy to see it in action. Patience is, as Lloyd Alexander put it, one of the more difficult virtues.

Waiting was the right thing to do, though, and patience is called a Virtue for a reason. It’s yielded far more fruit than jumping ahead would have. Not only did work on those old publications help me find their audience, I learned much about that audience. I found it wasn’t all the same person. Each book grew under my eyes like pottery, taking shape, until I saw different people in each book. A lot of authors write steadily for just one reader—they become a “go-to” for that reader, a safe place where the reader knows to expect a tried-and-true. That’s great for many people, but you don’t have to write that way. It’s also okay to have many different readers.

And the best part was that taking a couple of years before I worked on anything new allowed many ideas to start flowing into my mind. I now have 4 or 5 exciting concepts that are growing rapidly and each of them is different from what I’ve written before. And different from each other, as all my previous books have been. Without taking time with my older books, my creative juices might have died out. You can over-write, you know. But instead they are getting stronger and in the process, so are my older books.

Waiting means you don’t have all the answers yet. And it also means God does know them and will soon share them with you.
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And there will be more updates.