Connecting Dots

I built a fantasy world complete with warring factions of elves, humans, and an awesome hive-dwelling race. I wrote five novels in this fantasy world. Those novels now sit in Scrivener, waiting for me to return to them and continue rewriting. (Despite the Madeline L’Engle quote above, they’re definitely not for children.)

I started a little fantasy novella two years ago for a submission call. The longer it became, the more I realized it would fit better within the fantasy world I’d created. Why not? The more I talked about a war between elves and humans, I realized I knew those elves, and the villain of the story could easily be another human blood mage like the faction causing chaos in the series.

This story is set one hundred years before the series. It focuses on humans and elves working together to thwart an uprising, even after the town’s population of elves is completely wiped out for a blood ceremony. The series itself arises from the success of evil that day in other locations.

As I’m writing, I’m developing an elf character who works with the humans. He’s not very powerful, which is how he’s avoided detection from the blood mages. The more I write, the more I realize I know him. He plays an important part in books three and four. In his series backstory, he came from this particular city. It’s as though I’m remembering rather than making it up. Writing the whole series was like that. I wrote five books in four years like a mad woman. This world, this elf, exists. Now I know where he was for the eclipse, and how he came to be at the Tower of Velastes.

I might need to re-read the entire series for continuity before I submit this story, but for now I’m content just connecting the dots.