Welcome to our Monday Coffee. Every Monday is set aside for musings and considerations around the Twinverse, the Tales, and the writing craft as a whole. We will occasionally discuss sources of inspiration for the Twinverse, share some text from existing or upcoming books, discuss the history of the Twinverse's development, and how roleplaying games have contributed to fleshing out the world. We may even look at some of the original documentation on the Twinverse, at its very beginning. Happy Monday!
Today's post is a bit different from most others. Following the announcement of the re-release of North Star as a Kindle exclusive on August 15 (with paperback to follow), I have been thinking about how it felt to go back to the original manuscript, re-reading it to both ensure that the material was still something I was happy with, and that it still fit with the way the Twinverse has grown and evolved since North Star was published.
When I wrote North Star, in 2007, the Twinverse was only three years old. While many foundational elements were already in place, the setting didn't have nearly the complexity or depth it achieved over the next fifteen years. Truthfully, at that time, most of the well-developed sections of the setting consisted of the areas that I had had to develop for the roleplaying game campaign in which the Twin Worlds were born. The region of Brightland, where most of the adventures of the wyldervay took place, as well as snippets of outer worlds such as Sisteri, Enu, Londìr, Tiogair, Sheere, Tresis, and Dorwyn, in addition to later additions in Ailund and Khreth-Alakh.
I had already written several short stories set in that region, some of which will become available on the website for free shortly. Some had been written to further expand the setting and crystallize some concepts, others simply because they had come to me powerfully, and I needed to let them out. But when I wrote Ghostblood (which, chronologically speaking, was written and published on the Kevin's Watch anthology before North Star), it was the first time I set a story in a region which, although it had been described in general terms, had never been truly developed from a cultural perspective.
Even so, when the time came to write North Star, I needed to change locations again. I wasn't sure where the story would be initially set, because I kept running into false starts. It was only when I realized that the narrator wasn't human - and came up with the character of Riyya - that I understood the story would start in Irig, a land where there is no centralized government and roaming tribes of nurain live off the land, in harmony with the world around them.
Of course, North Star doesn't stop there. It expands into Dalluth, Ailund, Freyfthor, Rusinnar... Rereading the manuscript made me realize how much fun it had been to develop these locations and the concepts associated with them (such as Eraslantyr). In that way, North Star has become a seminal work for me as a writer. It has given the impetus for the creation of concepts that would later go on to grow in importance (for instance, Ailund, the Knights of the Ashes, and the people of Rusinnar were the basis for a whole campaign story later on), expanded the mythology of the Twinverse, and last but not least, kickstarted the concept of the Tales: loosely interconnected, standalone books (or short series) set in the same worlds. Not as cosmologically widespread as the Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson, nor with an overarching plotline (although various stories feed into other major storylines).
My goal is that, if a Tale isn't part of a series such as Amaranth or the Pact of Four, it should be perfectly enjoyable (and stand) on its own. But it would still loosely connect to others via Easter eggs, shared characters (or mentions of concepts, locations, etc.).
North Star is loosely connected to others, although if I ever write the tale of the Ashen Lantern, it will become far more important. But all existing and future stories I planned will connect, tangentially or directly, to Leaves, the first new story in a while. Leaves will be the hub of the wheel, as it were, connecting to all stories as a "tale of tales", if you will. I sincerely hope you will enjoy it, when it is released.
In the end, it was nostalgic and bittersweet to go back to North Star's original manuscript. Many things have changed since it was written, although from an in-universe perspective, it holds up quite well compared to how the setting has evolved. I only needed to make a few minor adjustments, that don't change the story in any substantial way. It was a proud moment, however, when I submitted the new manuscript for publication. North Star always held a special place in my heart, and I can't imagine it will ever lose it.
So here's to Riyya's and Gaenor's adventure, starting again. I hope you fall in love with the book as much as I did when I wrote it, and that this is just your first step in the Twin Worlds!
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