Why am I publishing a ten year old manuscript here?
Well, the obvious answer is that after ten years I'm unlikely to return to it and treat it as a WIP. It has moved from backup to backup, from laptop to new laptop, and I casually opened it once every two years or so.
A lot has happened in that time. Both to me as well as to the fantasy genre. When I started writing The Taleweaver urban fantasy, especially the vampire kind, was rapidly growing into an important sub-genre, but the bulk of published fantasy was still securely in the 'young farmer boy is found out to be the king/archmage/messiah/you-name-it' -type of epic fantasy. After which said boy magically attains all the needed competence to rule a world in a shockingly short amount of time. Time most spent killing countless of enemies, which in my book has never been a very good school for learning how to rule a world in peace. The very word 'fantasy' took on a rather derogative meaning for me.
So I set out to write a book about adults. And I have always been interested in mixing genres, so science fantasy it was.
Now, twelve years later (it took two years to write two books) I found wattpad while peddling a very different book, and it struck me that I could as well publish what I had once finished but never was truly satisfied with.
Would I have written these two books today? No. While the sequel, Frays in the Weave, is closer to how I would form a story today, it's still the work of a younger man than I am today.
To begin with I would never have sent my main characters on a wild goose-hunt across a continent. Not after having introduced Verd to the reader.
Built on magic. A magic capital in a nation that abhors magic, with over six hundred thousand inhabitants it takes an effort to introduce the city to a reader. It's filled with enough wonder and history to keep the characters in it for an entire book without tiring the reader.
While I would have lost the opportunity to introduce some of my most loved supporting cast I could have waited one book to give them time on the stage. And today i would have had Arthur and Harbend fight the dirty political machinations that eventually was all in vain due to the events central to Frays in the Weave.
But 'if' is a strange word. Truth is I no longer have the interest needed to rewrite over two hundred thousand words from scratch. So this is the tale I'll tell, the tale I wrote and the tale that already exist.
While dubious for paper publication I can still say that I have bought and read worse. Mostly because I've read an absurd amount of fantasy. Our bookshelves line our walls, and fantasy is stacked double and on top. Upright and sideways, and we now have very little room for more books.
You, as a reader, should be aware that The Taleweaver and Frays in the Weave are self contained stories. They both have a beginning, a middle and an end, but, and this is an important but, they don't represent the entire tale.
A third book, A Weave in Shreds, lies unwritten in my mind. That book was meant to finish this tale.
Unless something exceptional happens that book will stay unwritten.
