From the second last week of May, I had actually moved into new territory. That is, I had put aside my WIP and gone into outlining my tentative next project. So I’m currently outlining book 1 or the grandma’s story.
I think I mentioned it before but somehow I decided that it will fit right into a particular reign of a Han dynasty Emperor with all of the associated background. So this is a research intensive writing project which I haven’t attempted for a while (I did loads of Mongolian research for the novel series-would-be starring Genghis Khan and his first wife). And this time around, I quite like it, especially when after research, historical events turned out to fall so nicely within the space of my story.
So, while I would never put my work under Historical Fantasy, I don’t think, I think this series would be somewhat in the spirit of Guy Kavriel’s Under Heaven and River of Stars, which are based on the Tang and Song dynasties but starring completely fictional or inspired-by-historical-figures-but-adapted-as-I-saw-fit protagonists. Also in that it would feature a single historical event in a broad sketch way but not necessarily down to the actual details (actually, I could not really say to the extent to which Under Heaven/River of Stars stay true to the important historical event that it fictionalised but as an ethnic Chinese, I can attest to the big gist of it staying the same, I get the feel that parts of it were being revised to fit the stories). At least that’s how I envision it for book 1. For book 2, I expect I might move back out to even less historical realms. But then, I don’t really know since I haven’t outlined it yet. And no, I’m not going to outline book 2 and 3 while book 1 is still to be written. That was the hard lesson I learnt through the Mongolian project- never take on multiple books at the same time even if they are for the same series. It’s a fast road to schizophrenia and project burnout.
I’m giving this project the whole of June and then in July, it’s back to my WIP with fresh eyes.
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