FROSTBORN retrospective #3

Note that this post has !!!SPOILERS!!! for the first fourteen books in FROSTBORN.

For today’s retrospective, let’s talk about the love triangle. 🙂

In the past six years, I have published millions of words of fiction, but I have gotten more email about the love triangle in FROSTBORN than anything I have ever written, ever.

Here are three most common things readers email me about:

1.) The FROSTBORN love triangle.

2.) When if ever will Caina and Kylon in THE GHOSTS have a romantic relationship?

3.) When is the next book in the series coming out?

(Also, people email me a lot about using Blu-Ray in Ubuntu Linux for some reason, even though I’ve never actually written about using Blu-Ray in Ubuntu.)

The love triangle in FROSTBORN is one of those things I actually planned out from the beginning. Most love triangles in modern fiction involve two men and one woman, and the woman has to choose between them, usually after three or four books of agonizing. I thought that would be really boring to write, so I flipped it on its head and made the triangle into two women competing for the same man.

I had never actually written a love triangle before, so what I learned is that you can get an amazing amount of narrative tension and reader engagement out of a love triangle. I’ll have to do it again in future books at some point.

I got quite a bit of angry email after the endings of THE IRON TOWER and THE WORLD GATE. But, like I said, reader engagement! 🙂

Probably the funniest quote about it is from FROSTBORN: THE MASTER THIEF:

Calliande smiled, and Morigna laughed. It made them both look radiant. An odd thing to consider now, but it was true. Jager wondered what Ridmark had done to win the loyalty of two lovely sorceresses. Still, given Morigna’s barbed tongue and Calliande’s iron will, perhaps that was a fate Jager would inflict upon no man.

-JM