The Next Big Thing: Rothnen Cycle

Rabia Gale tagged me for the Next Big Thing meme, wherein I wax eloquent on matters of this big novel I'm supposed to be writing next. I've got a few issues with picking a project, something about the fact that I've had two of them for a while and have had yet to nail my focus, but I'm going to just pick one and run with it.

1. What is the working title of your next book?

The Rothnen Cycle

I learned something about myself over the course of failing NanoLite: I kept trying to segregate out the different plot threads of City of Glass, of The Rothnen Cycle, and kept failing miserably. I couldn't find and keep my focus, so I kept not getting anywhere with either of them, despite knowing way more about both stories than a girl ought.

Job hunt put me on the right direction: I'm a detail-oriented of the whole big picture kind of gal and I kept losing the forest for the trees. Thus, the title of the book is technically what I thought was a series title because it gives me back my focus. It's a rather expanded version of the Vardin story.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

Vardin was born from my fandom tendencies, the exposition of the theories I developed regarding gifts and powers, and this story itself was born from the way I acquire characters, make them my own in the premise of my making, and all the dynamics and tightly interwoven relationships that emerged from playing them out in the Vardin world. The Rothnen Cycle covers not even the tip of my personal storyworld iceberg, but it captures a big picture of a fragile time when the outside world 'discovers' Vardin—which has always known about the outside world—, the people involved in that discovery, who cause that discovery, and who are most affected by it. It covers the couples who are bound, whether they know it or not, and yet held apart by the distance between baseline human and gifted human and how those bonds affect Vardin as a whole.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Science Fiction Fantasy. It's really science fiction, but I've never liked to limit myself and I write it in a firmly fantasy style half the time.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I plead the fifth. Seriously. I've been 'acquiring' characters since I was five years old and now, they are truly mine, but I wouldn't exactly want to hand out to the world who each character was based on. Though I think only a handful will be obvious to those in the know.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

:blinks: Might I mention that this is cruel and unusual punishment to try to even shoehorn an almost series-length book into a single sentence? Duly mentioned, here goes:

The Queen of Vardin is dying, a team of explorers has ventured upon the land's hidden shore, and the whole world is about to discover a place where people are divided between the baseline and the gifted, where dragons and mythical creatures are real, and where the balance of power in Vardin can affect the entire world.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Self-Published

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Still working...

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I wish I knew, but I really don't.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

See #2. Also, Kirsten of A Scenic Route. She liked a snippet from Storm, the first part of The Rothnen Cycle, and startled me into realizing I had found the Vardin voice.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

To create a one-sentence summary makes the whole story seem so big stakes, big picture, but the truth is that this is a story about individuals making choices, commitments, and sacrifices based on their love for significant others, for their families, for their nation. It's about a Queen who can either care for her people or marry the man she will always be bound to. It's about an outsider who learns the terrible secret of Vardin and must choose between the world he's always known and the one that embraces him as its own. It's about a girl raised as an outsider but born to Vardin and wishing as hard as she can that she could be both. It's about the hard choice between forcing the guardians to remain hidden in their own land or allowing them to reveal what they really are—and put the whole world at risk of repeating Vardin's worst and most terrible mistakes.

Tagged: in_the_blue, lithiumlaughter, pygmymuse, and xenokattz. Fandom perfectly permitted.