A few days ago, I was struck by a realization that floored me. Last month I released Flower in the Darkness, the first new installment in The Tales of Remnas series after a two-year hiatus. At approximately 100,000 words, it is the shortest of the six books currently available. The other five average about 115,000 words per book.
My romantic fantasy epic is going to be ten books long, and it’s highly doubtful that the final four installments will be shorter than Flower in the Darkness. In fact, I suspect they will be longer than the current record holder, When the Crow Smiles’ healthy word count of 125,000.
By the time this series is finished, I will have written more than one million words on this one project alone. That’s longer than War & Peace or the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
1,000,000.
That number is quite staggering when you see it written out with all the zeroes. But I suppose an epic word count is fitting for an epic journey.
Don’t worry. I don’t intend take another two years to publish the next one. I had originally planned to publish one Remnas book per year for the next four years. But something changed.
The series struggled to find a readership since Flower Among the Ashes was published in 2016. It had too many rippling abs and spicy scenes for traditional fantasy readers. Yet too many things that weren’t rippling abs for readers looking for a spicy romance. But something happened last month. The series blew up in a big way. At one point in late August Flower Among the Ashes hit three top 100 lists on the Kindle store simultaneously.
I can’t express how validating it was for this series to finally know success after years of languishing in obscurity. If you haven’t checked out the Tales of Remnas novels yet, you really should. I don’t think there is anything else quite like it. If you are looking for something that combines high fantasy with thirst, these are the books for you.
I want to make this series a priority next year. Partly because it seems to have finally found a readership. Partly because I began writing the series in 2013. With the publication schedule I have set, it won’t be complete until 2022 at the earliest. I think that a decade is long enough to spend on any one project and, if I kept with my original plan, the story would not come to its final conclusion until 2024.
I have a tentative schedule for the next three books.
Daughter of Dawn – June 2021
Son of Dusk –December 2021
The Blood of Heroes – January 2022
Work on Daughter of Dawn and Son of Dusk is well underway. These two books see Lenna and Rem, Rekki and Arshé’s twins, going on their own epic journeys to discover their place in the world. Rekki and Arshé’s story is not over. Neither is it for all the characters you’ve grown to know and love. Like everything else in the Tale of Remnas, character paths connect and intertwine in interesting ways. It will be no different with the twins.
The journey of a million words is not over yet.