Recursions: Journeys into Mondia
Macmillan's decision last year to pass on their option to publish The Last Free City seemed to spell the end of any further novels about Mondia. In their place sprang The Inheritance Powders, a historical novel set in the court of Louis XIV, or a brand-new fantasy series. I worked up both of these projects in moderate detail but, for various reasons, neither has quite taken off.
My imagination remains, from whatever quirk or perversity, in the commercial graveyard known as Mondia. (I'm not quite convinced that it is commercially doomed: my Mondia stories stand alone, and each one can set out blithely on its way unencumbered by continuity with a predecessor. Nonetheless, more Mondia is not the career-pragmatic route).
Each time I think about a Mondia story, I go further back in time. I wondered how some of the characters in The Dog of the North became the way they were, and this requires delving ever further back into my imaginary world. To give just one example: in the later strand of The Dog of the North, Enguerran is King of the Emmenrule. The reader never finds out very much about him (although he has a walk-on part in The Last Free City). I know far more about his character than I ever share with the reader. I also have loosely plotted a story in which he is an infant (his grandfather King Arren being the central figure), and considered making a novel of that. But then I became interested in King Arren's past, and so plotted another story in which he is a youth, and his father King Alazian sits on the throne.
This sort of recursiveness can go on forever, of course. I have to stop somewhere, but at least I have a depth of field so that anything I write covering four generations of kings has some hinterland. As it is, the story of King Alazian and his rebellious barons, has more than enough to keep me occupied.
For a while at least, then, my focus is once again on Mondia.
Macmillan's decision last year to pass on their option to publish The Last Free City seemed to spell the end of any further novels about Mondia. In their place sprang The Inheritance Powders, a historical novel set in the court of Louis XIV, or a brand-new fantasy series. I worked up both of these projects in moderate detail but, for various reasons, neither has quite taken off.
My imagination remains, from whatever quirk or perversity, in the commercial graveyard known as Mondia. (I'm not quite convinced that it is commercially doomed: my Mondia stories stand alone, and each one can set out blithely on its way unencumbered by continuity with a predecessor. Nonetheless, more Mondia is not the career-pragmatic route).
Each time I think about a Mondia story, I go further back in time. I wondered how some of the characters in The Dog of the North became the way they were, and this requires delving ever further back into my imaginary world. To give just one example: in the later strand of The Dog of the North, Enguerran is King of the Emmenrule. The reader never finds out very much about him (although he has a walk-on part in The Last Free City). I know far more about his character than I ever share with the reader. I also have loosely plotted a story in which he is an infant (his grandfather King Arren being the central figure), and considered making a novel of that. But then I became interested in King Arren's past, and so plotted another story in which he is a youth, and his father King Alazian sits on the throne.
This sort of recursiveness can go on forever, of course. I have to stop somewhere, but at least I have a depth of field so that anything I write covering four generations of kings has some hinterland. As it is, the story of King Alazian and his rebellious barons, has more than enough to keep me occupied.
For a while at least, then, my focus is once again on Mondia.
