I spent all of the summer of 2023 slowly developing this story. I put it aside last fall, to return to, and finish, the half-finished Passage to Jarpara story I had previously started. Besides wanting to finish that story, I didn't want to find myself in the middle of writing this story burned out after having spent so much time thinking about it. I wanted to come back to write it fresh.
As it turned out, that decision worked well. After finishing Jarpara, I was eager to start work on it. I started writing it on 1 March and wrapped up the first 145K word draft in slightly less that 90 days - on the 27th of May. It was the smoothest writing process I've experienced in a long time. Part of this is due to the fact that I had created written bullet-point notes, with a calendar listing of all the scenes in the story. Usually I'm content to just having the story in my head. But having decided to delay the actual writing of it, I didn't trust myself to remember what I'd finally settled on when I returned to it. Writing, at least in my process, involves exploring many scenes and variations of those scenes, many of which end up on the cutting room floor. I feared that I might not remember what I had finally settled on.
Right from the start, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do in this story. I wanted to write an anti-fantasy fantasy novel, one that was the polar opposite of much of today's fantasy, especially, grimdark fantasy. Not a very commercially sound idea, but that's what I felt like doing.
Below is a possible opening to its blurb:
Have you grown weary of long, dark and grim fantasy epics? Tired of evil priests, ruthless kings, sinister queens, knaves, and scoundrels – intricate palace intrigues and endless wars? Are you jaded by blood-soaked tomes of battle after battle, death after death? Need a break from accounts of disembowelment, torture, rape, and murder? In short, are you looking for a change of pace, a different sort of fantasy? Look no further.
Now, there is a somewhat new fantasy sub-genre that is considered a response to grimdark fantasy called cozy fantasy. However, I don't really consider my story a cozy fantasy - I don't describe every meal in detail, nor are there any fairies, gnomes, dragons, wizards, or fantasy tropes in it. Basically, it's so anti-fantasy, that it's only a fantasy on the technicality that it mentions sorcery, and is not set on Earth, with no big new concepts that might make it science fiction.
As I said in my writing update, this is a very different book from most of my other efforts. It's longest book I've written since The Lost Star's Sea, and certainly the most boring as well. Deliberately so. Nothing very extraordinary happens in it. It's very much a slice of an ordinary life story, with a twist of mystery folded into it. I figured if literary fiction can get away without much of a plot, so can genre. All in all, it's not a book that I think will appeal to a lot of my readers. But what the heck, I rather like this one.
Though it is officially my 2025 novel, I expect to release it in the fall of 2024. Unlike my last book I'm giving my beta readers time to read this one.
I'll be talking more about Chateau Clare over the next several months. Stay tuned.
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