Too Big for Just One Book

By Rebecca Roland.

Shards of History emerged from a short story that felt too big to fit into a small word count, but when I finished the novel, I thought I was done. I wrote other stories. I moved on. But in the back of my mind, the characters from the novel kept on speaking. I started to wonder how Malia was getting along. At the end of the novel she was essentially a wounded warrior. I thought of all the soldiers who return from war, often with injuries not readily visible, and I thought of those who returned with very visible wounds. I wondered what might haunt Malia, and whether she could be haunted if she couldn't remember the war.

I also kept thinking about the Maddion women. They couldn't just go on living as they were in that horrible misogynistic society. And, even when I was writing Shards of History, I kept thinking of them and what they were going through back home. With the men off trying to find a cure for the illness killing them all, they were left to tend to the sick and to see their dead cared for. There was already a lot of upheaval going on in their lives with the illness, so I decided to push some more and see what happened. I found a woman among the Maddion whose story captured me, so I followed her, and through her I discovered that some of the women have been holding onto a secret.

I also did a lot of world building for Shards of History. A lot. I have oodles of notes that never made it into the book. In a way that's a good thing, because even though the details didn't make it into that first book, I think the idea that there's more to the world comes through in the writing. It feels more fully realized. And it provides plenty of fodder for a second book. I just couldn't let all that work go to waste. Plus, Shards of History takes place in a pretty cool world. I wanted to explore more of it.

Fractured Days, the sequel to Shards of History, is available now in trade paperback and ebook.

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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.