I’m back this post to talk about some of the choices that went into the cover design of the Land Mysteries books. As is visible, they take a different direction in some ways from my 1920s books. There are also a number of details you might not have spotted that I’ve been wanting to highlight!
One note that this post contains spoilers for key moments in the books (since that’s relevant to what’s on the cover). I’m avoiding talking about details here, as much as feasible. But if you want to avoid all spoilers, go have fun reading and come back when you’ve read the relevant books!
It’s time for a teaser of coming attractions, following on in the late 1940s after the Land Mysteries series. The second section has some spoilers for Illusion of a Boar.
The Land Mysteries
For a good while – several years – I was convinced I wasn’t going to write anything after the first half of 1929. I wasn’t as interested in writing the 1930s (especially the heart of the global Great Depression), and I also wasn’t sure about getting deeper into writing the Second World War.
And then I wrote Eclipse. Kiya left a marginal comment about wanting to see Geoffrey Carillon and Alexander Landry team up to take on munitions dealers. Every single one of my early readers commented on that idea and also wanted to see it. I gave in to the inevitable. As you do.
It took some more thinking, though. I didn’t want to do just one book, hanging out there at that chronological range. It felt unbalanced. So that meant thinking about what else I could write that was interesting in the Second World War.
One of the things I realised early on is that as much as I wanted to write more romances, that it’s tricky to write romances actually during a war. (Not impossible, as the series proves, but it probably wouldn’t sustain a whole series sensibly). Getting people in the right place for long enough is tricky!
But I also wanted to explore the other kinds of relationships people have in their lives. Sometimes that’s family. (Sometimes that’s enemies to “it’s complicated” to family.) Other times it’s about mentorship. Sometimes it’s about professional commitments or goals that emerge and need doing. Sometimes it’s about chosen siblings and friendship.
Welcome to our Idea to Book post for The Magic of Four, which just came out at the beginning of May. (This means that from now I’ll add a new Idea to Book post a few weeks after the book comes out. But you won’t have a long string of them.)
The Magic of Four is also the last book in the Land Mysteries series, which explores three themes during the Second World War. Those are a range of different kinds of relationships in our lives. It’s also about the land magic, and how Albion responds to the Second World War. You can see all three of those here, in various ways.
The Magic of Four has everything you might hope for in a school story. There are snippets of classes, finding friends, dealing with student problems. And of course, because it’s Schola, it’s got magical sports (pavo and a dash of bohort), secret societies, and all the implications of a magical school.
As I’ve noted, I do have plans for three romances. Ursula Fortier (Leo’s older sister) will have hers in 1947, Edmund Carillon (Ros’s older brother) in 1948, and Claudio Warren (in his 40s, and close to both Leo and Avigail) in 1950. Those will let me tie up some loose threads on other ongoing questions about the land magic, living in post-war Albion, and the Council. Learn more about my plans.
It was hard to choose who would be up second in this series of In Character posts focusing on particular individuals in my books. Thomas Benton is often in the background, but I love his steadiness, his loyalty, and his competence.
Benton is a point of view character in Ancient Trust (a prequel novella in 1922) and his own romance, On The Bias, in 1926. The best way to find all the books with Benton somewhere in the picture are the books about the Carillon family. (You can find that list at the end of this post, for convenience.)
As I did in 2021, we’re going to go at this by character (alphabetically by first name), since many relevant characters appear in multiple books. My goal with writing has always been to reflect a wide range of experiences of the world like me and many of my friends. And that includes people who don’t always get to be the ones on adventures or getting a happy ever after romance.
There are a number of other characters in my books you might reasonably read as neurodiverse. I’ve mentioned a few at the end of the post that Kiya and I have discussed back and forth, but some of this is in the eye of the beholder. Reader perception is important too!
Just want to explore some books? Here are all the titles that particularly feature a neurodiverse character.
Welcome to my plans for 2024. Of course, it’s always possible that reality will interfere at some point, but here’s what I’m hoping for in the coming year:
It’s late December, which means it’s also the time when various sites post their reading challenges. If you’re doing one in 2024, here’s a guide to which of my books might fit particular categories. (If you’re doing a challenge not listed here, and other people can join in, send me a link and I’ll add it!) You might also want to check out my post about summer reading challenges from the summer of 2023.
