Vanessa is Visiting Today!
welcome, Vanessa, author of the Fireborn series!
I actually never meant for Fireborn to be a series. I wrote Dragon Whisperer before I discovered the joys (and somewhat necessity) of outlining and I didn’t even have a clear idea of where the book was going as I was writing it, except that I meant for it to be a stand alone.
In a lot of ways, the first three books do stand alone, each with a different protagonist and influenced by previous events but not in a way that readers necessarily need to see. So anyway, I hadn’t intended to write a sequel to Dragon Whisperer, let alone an entire series.
But once friends and family started reading it, they kept asking me when I was writing another one.
For a long time I didn’t know how to answer that. Dionelle’s story was over. Now that cozy fantasy is a thing, I see that I probably could have taken her story in that direction for some sequels—and I might still! Tangent books are fun! But as I went to workshops on writing series and the benefits of them (primarily not having to constantly invent new worldbuilding) I decided to explore how to make a future Dragon Whisperer book work.
It was around the time the second How to Train Your Dragon movie came out and I was deep into the franchise and wanted to do something similar. Thus began the seeds of what is now the third book, Fireborn. But in order to write the kind of story I wanted, I needed a vastly different world.
So it was only once I had a solid idea for book three that I started to conceive of book two. Trueflame was originally meant as a bridge between Dragon Whisperer and Fireborn, something meant just for me so that how and why the world changed would make sense.
But then I wrote and liked it. I was intrigued by Neesha, who was deeply unlikeable in the first draft, but grew with subsequent drafts into the complicated woman she is now. She might still be somewhat unlikeable to a lot of people, but what’s important to me now is that she’s complex and in a lot of ways relatable. She’s fighting against a regressive society as she struggles to find independence and who she really is, dodging expectations and chasing big ambitions.
While I planned book three first, I wrote them in chronological order, as is my way. And I finished Fireborn and thought I’d make it first of a trilogy or series. I had rough ideas on how to expand it. But then the pandemic hit and a lot of things changed and the plans I was making for that possible trilogy relied on tropes I wasn’t interested in anymore. It would have killed off characters who had fascinating potential.
So I scrapped my plans, condensing parts of two books into one and making it something completely different. Book four, Firebound, still needs some work before its release later this year, but it leans deeper into family, healing, potential and what happens when powerful women work together across generations instead of making sacrifices.
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Thank you for visiting, Vanessa!
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