The next urban fantasy trilogy!

Today I’m officially revealing the main character and setting of the next Magiford Supernatural City series! The important thing to know is that we’re going to visit werewolves!

Yes, that’s right! As many of you guessed, the next trilogy will feature the Northern Lakes werewolf pack–that’s the werewolf pack Chase Washington from Court of Midnight and Deception is a part of!

The series will follow the shenanigans of Phillipa “Pip” and the pack alpha, Greyson. Greyson is obviously a werewolf, but Pip is human! Or, more correctly, she’s a sort of sub-version of a wizard as she is, in fact, a werewolf hunter!

Yep, a werewolf hunter living with a pack of wolves–that should be fun to read about!

Werewolf hunters lack the elemental magic regular wizards have, but Pip get’s some pretty fun trade offs and some specialty strands of magics that wizards don’t have. Which is good for her–she needs every advantage she can get when it comes to surviving with the werewolves!

You can count on seeing Chase in this trilogy, and a few other familiar faces from Court of Midnight and Deception! And while Pip and the werewolves live in northern Wisconsin, they will frequently come to Magiford. They live in a cute little tourist town–which, surprise, has a mini golf course–and as of now I’m planning to have Pip work in the town’s welcome center…which should provide buckets of fun given the wide variety of supernaturals that come to visit!

This trilogy will hopefully launch in early 2022, if this year goes according to plan. I don’t have a working series title or any book titles, but I’ll be sure to update you Champions later in the year once everything is settled.

And this draws an end to the Magiford themed posts. Right now I’m hard at work on Angelique, but I’ve got some sales and other stuff up my sleeve to help you wait it out. Thanks for reading, Champion! Have a lovely week, and I hope you enjoyed our visit to Magiford! 😉

Magiford Supernatural City!

As we start to wind down all the Court of Midnight and Deception I thought this was a great time to discuss the future for my urban fantasy world! First of all, I have an exciting announcement–the world is going to have it’s own name, which will make future series in this universe a lot easier to identify. I’m calling it the “Magiford Supernatural City” world/universe. 😀

I already have quite a few plans for this world, but I thought I’d go over what you can expect. As of now (2021) the plan is to release one series per year. Currently I plan to write only trilogies in this world, and most likely they’ll all follow the same launch pattern of approximately two months to get all three books.

There will be an arc that tangentially follows the Paragon and his mysterious quest–which we now know from what he’s told Leila that he’s searching for someone. The Paragon’s search will have four series total, with two of them being Hall of Blood and Mercy and Court of Midnight and Deception. (This means you’ll get two more trilogies to tie up the Paragon’s search.) I’m guessing some of you will assume that means the Paragon will be the hero of one of the two remaining trilogies, but he’s not. The Paragon has a very…strong personality, and it’s very unique which is honestly a bit difficult to market. At this time I have no plans for him to have a trilogy of his own, but I might give him a standalone novella or novel depending how everything finishes. (I still have other series to work on, after all.)

The next Magiford Supernatural City trilogy–which I’ll release in 2022–will not involve the Paragon’s quest. It’s going to be a spin off of sorts–I’ll get into the specifics of it in the next post!

I do already have plans for a few additional spin off series–besides the trilogy that will launch in 2022. All of them will tackle different kinds of supernaturals and issues, but you’ll always get to see a few old characters in each trilogy. You’ll find that I’ve planted seeds to these spin offs in the four trilogies that make up the Paragon’s quest!

Even better, we’ve seen and heard of the heroine that will fill out the third trilogy of the Paragon’s search! We saw her in a Hall of Blood and Mercy short, and she was discussed in one of the Court of Midnight and Deception books and a short as well. 😉 Can you find her? (I am planning for this heroine’s series to launch in 2023.)

That’s all for today, Champions! In the next post–which is the last Magiford themed post–we’ll talk about the next Magiford Supernatural City trilogy!

The Journey

Typically, I plot out my books meticulously because I hate rewrites, and my general goal is to avoid them as much as possible. But as I mentioned in my 2020 recap post, this year I listened to Brandon Sanderson’s class via youtube, and I decided to really drill down and focus on shaping my characters by the principals he presents. Unfortunately, that meant I had a couple off scenes and one long false start that I ended up having to redo. I asked the Champions in our Facebook Group if they’d be interested in seeing these deleted scenes and edited snippets, and the overwhelming answer was yes! So let’s take a walk down memory lane and see how I re-shaped parts of CoMaD through out the writing process!

1) The Original beginning: As part of the refining process I ended up having to redo the first 20 pages of Crown of Shadows. The events all stayed the same–even most of the dialog is there, though there is an additional fae character I cut for the sake of keeping things shorter. But in the original ending, Leila’s hatred for the fae came on a little too strong to the point where she was bitter and was pretty much impossible to work with once I got her to the mansion. I ended up having to go back and significantly soften her disdain for fae, which made her about 50% less paranoid (which is saying something) and also made her a lot more likable. (As a character, she wasn’t meshing well with Skye, Indigo, or even the Paragon because of her dislike of fae. That made her extremely unlikable since the Paragon is a pretty popular character.) If you want to see this original, more hate-filled version of Leila, click here for the PDF!

2) An incredibly lazy fight scene: The fight scene you see in Magiford Mid Summer Derby where Leila and the night mares are attacked is actually the second version of the fight. I had an original fight scene that was much shorter….honestly because I was feeling lazy at the time and really needed to just FINISH the book. When I did my first read-through of the book I ended up doing a rehaul of the scene because it was just so…bad. It was too short, the use of magic didn’t make sense, and it felt amateurish. Worse yet, it was supposed to be the climax moment in the book! Yeah, a lot of work had to be done to save it. Click here for the PDF if you’d like to witness this original fight.

3) Leila asks Rigel to be King: In Queen’s Crown, Leila asks Rigel to be King of the Night Court. In the version that got published it’s a close moment between the pair, that shows a bit of Leila’s desperation. In the original version of the scene I hadn’t correctly underlined that Leila lacked a connection with her Court–and when I wrote this scene I already knew that and I knew I’d have to go back and fix it. During my first tread-through I did a better job of underlining the lack of connection–which I actually set up in Crown of Moonlight–but then I knew the somewhat slap-dash/not-at-all-serious way Leila asks Rigel to be King in the first version of this scene wasn’t going to work. Rigel becoming King was a way bigger deal than I originally made it, and it was an important turning point in their relationship.  Click here for the PDF if you’d like to read that part of the original scene!

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There were a few more scenes that got some rehauls. In the wedding, I originally had a golem attack Rigel and Leila before I discussed the book with Britta–my beta reader–and she pointed out if I brought the spiders back in it would better draw in the initial attack, something I badly needed since I had to show the original offender hadn’t given up. I also did some rework with Leila in the mansion, and reworked a scene with her fae nobles, but the majority of those changes were minor or slight enough that you probably wouldn’t notice them very much.

But there you have it, Champions: a glimpse of how rough my books can be in the first drafts. Typically what I write in my first draft is very, very close to what you end up getting, it’s just finessed and I typically have to pull out a little more of the romance and underline more of the subplots.

I hope you enjoyed that behind-the-scenes peek! Thanks for reading, Champions, and have a wonderful day!