Lerebus has played only a minor role in my Ursia Chronicles so far, appearing briefly in Dark King of the North and in a slightly more important role in Under the Mountain. My first story of Lerebus was my short story Road of the Sword, which has been (very) slightly reworked and is now the first e-book in this new series. The second e-book in the series, An End to Rage, is also now available. The third e-book should be available within the next couple of weeks, and is titled Betrayal of the Self, with the fourth tale to be titled The Slave Pits of Mogus Potere. The fifth one's title I've not settled upon yet. And yes, eventually I'll gather all five of these tales into a collection.
Why am I writing and releasing these?
For several reasons. One, I'm continuing my experiment of the last few months concerning serial and serialized fiction, which this Lerebus series isn't exactly, but sort of is. This is just another step of that experiment. Two, one thing I've found I enjoy about serial fiction and similar fiction is that it allows me to tell stories that wouldn't necessarily be told otherwise because they aren't long enough to be novels within my broader Ursia Chronicles. Three, this little collection allows me to do some housecleaning, to get out of my head things (stories) I know about a character's past.
My Belgad character has an origin tale I also really want to tell, but my thinking right now is that that story would fit better as a trilogy of novels or novellas, though I'll wait and see.
And then there are all the stories I've yet to tell of the generation or so before that of my Kron Darkbow character, tales about the big war roughly sixty years before my City of Rogues novel begins. So far my Mage Hunter series has been my only step in that direction, but there will be more (for one thing, there's to be a Mage Hunter sequel series likely to be called Mage Slayer, the events taking place about 10 years after Mage Hunter but still a few years before the war).
So, for now, I'm experimenting with what are new (at least to me) forms of writing. I'm enjoying it. Some of my readers seem to, also.
Just picked up the first one. I haven't read it in the other form.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Charles. That one's an old story, probably going back near a decade.
ReplyDeleteAt first I didn't want to include it as part of the series because it had been around so long, but then I thought, it wouldn't make sense not to.