A look back at DRAGONSKULL

Two years, nine books, 731,000 words, and ten short stories later, the DRAGONSKULL series is finally complete!

Thank you all who came along on the quest of the DRAGONSKULL – I hope it was an enjoyable journey.

So it’s time to take a look back at the writing process. We’ll do this using the Internet’s favorite form of communication – a numbered list! 🙂

Note that this list will have minor spoilers for some of the nine books, so if you haven’t read them all yet, time to stop right here.

1.) Deciding on a new series

After I finished writing DRAGONTIARNA: WARDEN way back in summer 2021, I knew I wanted to write another epic fantasy series, I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I did know that I wanted it to be different than DRAGONTIARNA. If you will recall, DRAGONTIARNA had five main point of view characters over the ten books – Ridmark, Niall, Tyrcamber Rigamond, Moriah Rhosmor, and Third, along with a bunch of secondary POVs – and writing that got to be really challenging towards the end, since it’s generally best to include something of an arc for every main POV character in a book.

So after that, I wanted to write something a bit less complicated for my next series. Of the nine DRAGONSKULL books, the first five (with the exception of the epilogue) are entirely from the protagonist’s point of view.

I also wanted a more focused scope and stakes for the new series. Like, in DRAGONTIARNA, the fate of the cosmos was at stake, and you can’t do that with every book and every series. DRAGONTIARNA sometimes had major battles taking place simultaneously on two different worlds, and so I wanted to write something with a tighter focus for the new series.

I thought for a while about starting the new series in an entirely new setting. I do intend to do that at some point, but not this year, and probably not in 2024.

Since Andomhaim (and neighboring realms) is such a big place, I decided to set the new series there, and visit locations that we didn’t see too much of in FROSTBORN, SEVENFOLD SWORD, and DRAGONTIARNA – the Qazaluuskan Forest as beyond.

2.) Choosing a main character

I wanted to try a younger main character this time around. Ridmark, by the time of DRAGONTIARNA, was a middle-aged man, and by the time most people reach his age, they usually are who they are going to be. By contrast, a younger protagonist has more development and maturing to undergo, which means that there is an opportunity to tell a different kind of story.

I settled on Gareth as the main character, and decided to start the series when he was seventeen. Most of us, when we are seventeen, 1.) know nothing, 2.) think we know everything, and 3.) usually undergo a variety of unpleasant experiences to cure us of points one and two. Naturally, this provides excellent opportunities for storytelling.

In Gareth’s case, he thought he knew what it took to be an honorable knight, but he had gotten some of the particulars wrong. In hindsight, I think it took too long for him to develop – if I could do it over, I probably would have had that scene in book 2.

3.) The villain

The main villain was Azalmora, though of course we had numerous other villains over the course of the series.

I actually happened across her name by accident – in the first draft of THE FIRST SORCERESS, her name was Azermera. Then I was editing, and I mistyped her name and it came out with “Azalmora” instead. I thought that sounded much better, so I changed her name to Azalmora.

She turned out to be a pretty great villain – disciplined, intelligent, and self-controlled, which of course makes it easier to write the protagonists since the villain doesn’t make obvious mistakes that they have to be willfully blind not to exploit.

4.) Improvising the Norvangir

As you might recall if you have read my website for any length of time, I usually outline everything in advance, and I did the same thing with DRAGONSKULL.

I did, however, improvise the Norvangir entirely.

In the original outline, Gareth & company would meet the Ghost Path tribe of halflings after leaving the Qazaluuskan Forest. The closer I got to that point, however, the more bored I became with the idea, since it just felt like I would be digging up an obscure point from FROSTBORN: THE SKULL QUEST. At the time, I happened to watch a National Geographic (or possibly PBS) documentary about how the Vikings came to North America, specifically Canada, substantially sooner than anyone thought, and the idea took hold. What if a group of Vikings accidentally sailed into a mysterious mist that was actually a world gate and ended up in the world of Andomhaim?

I liked the idea enough that I rewrote the series outline to accommodate it, and thus the Norvangir were born. I do wish I had gotten the Ghost Path halflings into the story, but once I had swapped in the Norvangir it seemed like an unnecessary side quest at that point.

5.) Improvising Niara

Niara was always in the outline from the very beginning. I wasn’t entirely sure what her personality would be like, though. Early one, I envisioned her as much more somber and stoic. As the books went on and her character developed, the stoicism remained, but the somberness was replaced by a combination of a love of fighting, stubbornness, and a violent charisma. When Niara is convinced she is in the right, she absolutely will not back down, and will cheerfully fight anyone who tries to force her to change her mind.

I’ve found that happens quite a bit when writing fiction – you envision a character one way, but then you actually write them and they start interacting with the setting and the conflict and the other characters, and they turn out differently than the way you thought.

6.) The End

I’ve realized that when writing a series you need to have a definite end point in mind. Like, if you’re JD Robb, John Sandford, or Jeffrey Deaver, you can write a long series of open-ended novels about the same detective, but that doesn’t really work in fantasy. I’ve tried writing a fantasy series with an open-ended plotline in mind, but it never seems to work.

So the ending is important, both for the individual books and definitely for the entire series as a whole.

I think I arrived at a satisfactory ending for the series. The key to a proper ending, of course, is that it needs to provide emotional resolution to the conflicts raised previously in the story.

Fantasy as a genre has a bad reputation for unfinished series. Mostly this is the publishers’ fault – they’ll contract a writer for a trilogy or a five-book series, and then cancel it after the 2nd book only sells 80% of the copies of the first one. On occasion, it is the writer’s fault – the writer just bit off more than he or she can chew, or got excited with a new idea and didn’t really plan it out or think it through.

So I hope the ending for DRAGONSKULL is satisfying. And if it isn’t, remember than an ending is much better than no ending at all. 🙂

7.) What’s next?

DRAGONSKULL is over, but there’s more stories in the land of Andomhaim (and neighboring realms).

If all goes well, I will start SHIELD OF STORMS, the first book in THE SHIELD WAR series, sometime in the first half of 2024.

-JM