Rebecca Roland on the conclusion of her Shards of History series

I've thought about this moment for a long time. This moment has been, literally, years in the making. My fantasy series is complete. It's done. It's a wrap.
 
This series started as a short story written at the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2007. The final book in the trilogy came out in May 2017, nearly a full decade after that first bit was written. If anything ever proved that writing is a marathon and not a sprint, it's this.
 
I've grown a lot as a writer and as a person over the past decade, and the Shards of History series has been a huge part of that. I think that every book I wrote was stronger than the last. Or at least, the editing letters got a little shorter. I poured so much of what I love into the books — magic and dragons, the American Southwest and a dash of the Pacific Northwest, strong women, and biology in the form of a new species (the Jeguduns).
 
While I'm excited to see the trilogy complete and out in the world, it's a bittersweet moment as well. Life is all about moving ahead and changing and leaving one chapter of life behind for the next. I'm closing out a chapter with the release of Shattered Fates and opening a new chapter. It's exhilarating and terrifying and filled with promise.
 
There was a song I listened to over and over while writing Shattered Fates. It was Audiomachine's "Blood and Stone." I first heard the song during a performance on So You Think You Can Dance. Go find it on YouTube. Trust me, it's a great performance by two excellent ballet dancers. But the first time I heard it, and every time since then, I always thought of dragons and Malia. I pictured her during one of the most iconic scenes of Shattered Fates every time I heard it. I had that image in my head before I ever wrote the scene, and when I finally got to that part and wrote it, the song was there. That was the scene, and the song, that kept me going through the entire process of writing the book. Even now, when I hear it, I think of dragons.

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Rebecca Roland is the author of the Shards of History series, The Necromancer's Inheritance series, and The King of Ash and Bones, and Other Stories. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Nature, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Stupefying Stories, Plasma Frequency, and Every Day Fiction, and she is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. You can find out more about her and her work at rebeccaroland.net, her blog Spice of Life, or follow her on Twitter @rebecca_roland.

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