I decided to start talking about some of my series–you may not of heard of them, or read them, so I thought I’d talk a little about writing them and what I loved or didn’t love about doing so. The Wild Hunt is an 18-book urban fantasy series that’s finished, and I consider it some of my best work.
When I decided to write a new urban fantasy series—The Wild Hunt—I thought back to Otherworld. I knew I wanted to write a series from a single character’s point of view—I found out the hard way that, while writing from 3 POVs for OW, it impacted the storyline in terms of how much I could focus on the main storyline. So, I decided yes, ONE main character (Raven came in a bit later—I changed to 2 MCs when she refused to be quiet as I wrote A Shadow of Crows).
Then, I thought about an overall storyline, and decided to make it a little bit less focused. I wanted to dive into individual stories more than constantly keeping a Big Bad in the background. I like the Big Bad, but I wanted this series to be different.
Next, I thought about the family-of-choice. I always write family-of-choice, and that I wanted to keep. But, I wanted to keep it to a smaller group. And that I did. Yutani, Talia, Viktor, and Angel all felt tight, and I felt like I could focus on the friendships more—especially Ember and Angel’s friendship. Raven entered the scene in book four, but she brought with her, her own friendships, and it really felt like two separate stories tied together by crossover characters. Interestingly enough, Raven’s books didn’t sell as well as Ember’s.
I had a lot of fun writing Ember’s books—though I felt closer to Raven. Ember was angry at her people—both the Light and Dark Fae—and that came through to me. She didn’t want to be connected to either court, understandably so, and she never lost her scorn for them, even with what happened at the end of the series (won’t mention that here, in case you haven’t read the books yet). I loved coming up with the different creatures, and for the first time, it felt like the heroes in the books were more fleshed out than when I wrote Otherworld. I was more connected with Herne and Kipa, and really liked seeing Herne’s family play a huge part, even though they were gods.
I had great fun with the series, and I’m so glad it did find the audience I hoped it would. If you haven’t read it yet, and you love urban fantasy, I really recommend you give it a try. At eighteen books, there are a lot of adventures, and never once did I get bored writing the books.
Begin with The Silver Stag, or you can get the first three Wild Hunt Books free when you join my newsletter!
