I know there's a weekly Q&A posting in here right now, but I also said I'd use this book to announce new projects I'm working on, and, well.

Um.

I may or may not have started my next epic series midway through May?

It was an accident, I swear.

It totally wasn't an accident.

And then I wanted to yell about it here, but realized this whole saga has thus far been restricted to readers who follow my writing shenanigans on Discord, which meant I have to explain myself. It's probably high time I made a post about it anyway, so here I am... because my Hattu Empire series (aka Desert Epic) has been a line item in my monthly roundups since January, but the full story runs much, much deeper.

As I write this, it's been 9.75 years since I started my first book: Frost on the Grasslands, book one of the Shelha Series. Written over nine of those years, it spans six books and 570k words. Now, this isn't huge, as true epics go. The Harry Potter series has 1.1M, the full Percy Jackson series has 2.6M, and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series clocks in at a staggering 4.4M. But I started those Shelha books as a teenager, and for something written and rewritten without any knowledge whatsoever of how to plot, I'd say 570k is worth being proud of.

It also had a level of complexity that none of my newer series have come close to. This is why I've always called it an epic even though my ongoing trilogy might be almost as chonky once finished. The trilogy simply doesn't match the character count, number of subplots, world-ending stakes, and overall drama of the older series, so I call one an epic and the other my trilogy, and move on with my day.

Now, this oldest series came to occupy a special place in my heart for a number of reasons. Two of those are inextricably linked: its aforementioned complexity, and its writing time. Epic series really aren't like anything else you can write. They're so big, so deep, and occupy your mind for so long that any interaction with them as a writer feels like stepping into another world. It's the difference between imagining a book-world's features, and having one that's so well-developed, you can walk around inside it, studying its landscape, history, mythology, and the lives of the humans who live in it as if you were actually visiting. It's such a powerful feeling, it's hard to explain.

You also get to know those characters better than the ones of any other book. You are invested in their lives, their growth, their journeys, and their relationships for a decade or more. By the time you're that far in, you might have known them for longer than you know most of your friends. Their voices spring into your head with vivid nuance. You know their quirks and neuroticisms, their habits and behaviors, their preferences and connections. You know a thousand tiny things about them that you've accumulated over so many years and so much writing that nothing else in your WIP repertoire comes close.

This is the magic of epics. Readers who love them are there for that kind of texture, and for writers, the experience is even stronger. The writer of an epic will know even more than ever makes it into the books.

I had this experience with my oldest series. And as I wrote more standalones and series while its last two books wrapped up, I saw just how stark the difference was. I missed my first epic for years before it even finished, and that terrified me. Because while I'd come up with ideas for novels and trilogies and even a long-running serial in the meantime, in nine years, I'd yet to find another idea that was truly epic-scale.

Because you can't build an epic series on just any idea. Ideas have a limit to how long a book you can build on them, and it's difficult to explain just how big an idea an epic takes.

I suspect this was a factor in why the last four chapters of the last book of my series took me almost a year to write. I was ready to be done with that series, but I didn't want to let it go when I had nothing of equivalent value to replace it.

Until June 10th, 2021. At about two in the morning, obviously, because at what other time could I be found on YouTube, three hours down a rabbit hole of ancient, unsolved mysteries that had led me in that moment to something called the Bronze Age Collapse. This was an event that occurred between 1200 and 1150 B.C., and turned every major, powerful, organized society around the Mediterranean at the time to rubble in a matter of decades. We still don't know for sure what caused it, or why.

To say this idea seized my brain would be putting it lightly. I remember sitting in bed at 2:30 in the morning with tingles all up and down my arms as a single thought took shape: What would it look like for a Dark Fantasy series to follow the start-to-end collapse of an empire and civilization?

My writer-friend @CeeMTaylor got this message from me shortly thereafter:

That is how Desert Epic was born.

It's more formally known as the Hattu Empire Series, and its premise has not changed in the slightest since that original inspiration now almost a year ago. I spent that month going nuts on research and worldbuilding. By the end of June, I had more than 60k words—a small novel's worth—documented, spanning five major nations and four (now five) POVs. That's points of view, for the non-writers! I started with one major romantic relationship (a sapphic enemies-to-lovers) until another of my main characters decided the fourth was cute, and off they went, too.

I discovered which of the four was my main protagonist. Set up the structure of the Empire, the history and mythology that underpinned it, and the sociopolitical conditions that led to the first cracks. I poked at backstories and sketched out initial thoughts on character interactions. Identified a handful of key scenes. Read and listened to hours upon hours of podcasts, documentaries, books, articles, and more as I researched the hell out of everything from the Code of Hammurabi to drought-tolerant crop species to the making of bronze swords.

My inspiration for the series is wide-ranging, from the Han Empire in China, to Nubian conflict with the ancient Egyptian empire, to the societies and triggering conditions of the Bronze Age Collapse. The major sources, though, are a series of ancient peoples in and around the Middle East that rose, built empires, and then fell again thanks to a range of factors that I continue to study as intently as I do their languages, economies, writing systems, political systems, architecture, religions, trade routes, and more. These are the ancient Nabataeans, Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians. The layers of organization, cooperation, ingenuity, and expertise that allowed them to live and thrive in the deserts of the region form the foundation of the Desert Epic world.

The idea for the series was so massive, complex, and nuanced that I told myself I would budget two years for worldbuilding and research alone. Then I spent July writing something else, August writing almost nothing at all, and then I was off to grad school. I picked away at my worldbuilding to the tune of another 15k through the rest of that year and into the next, but the world and characters were stewing beneath the surface, and pressure was building. I had tens of thousands of words worth of things to document, and I'd yet to write them all down.

This past month, I decided to. In hindsight, I should have predicted what would happen next.

I'd told myself I would spend the first half of the month editing As the Crow Falls. Lol. Desert Epic stormed my brain from the moment I opened its worldbuilding document, and it didn't slow down for another three weeks. I finally nailed down backstories, identified the elusive fifth POV character, and fleshed out both romantic relationships. I identified more turning points and key areas of the world, then more. The path of the empire's fall came into clearer view.

And then I realized something. I'd told myself I would take two years before I started plotting, but I'd already started. It was just distributed across my worldbuilding document and character sheets in bits and bobs, because plot is tied to world is tied to character, so working on one inevitably involved building out the rest. I made a new document to pull all the pieces together. And that's when I realized I'd already functionally plotted the first four books.

Well, then.

I drilled down on those books to see how much I knew, and how much more I could pull together. They leaped together. I still needed another year for everything past book seven or eight, but I already had enough for the earlier books, and book one was the most developed of all. Also the most tightly plotted, requiring little knowledge of the more complex matters I still need to work on later in the series. That's because it's an intro... introducing the characters, learning the world, and dealing with a local challenge that sets the stage for the dominoes that will later begin to fall.

In the midst of all this, the opening scene of the first book came to me, followed by a dozen subsequent chapters. The characters had reached a point of development that would enable me to write them with confidence. And they wanted to be written. So badly. I could not for the life of me get them out of my head. On May 17th, my head was in a weird place and I didn't feel like working on any of my other projects. And so I told my writing community I was making bad decisions, and started writing the first book.

Two years nothing. I wrote 4.5k words that night. This sucker was ready to begin.

I predict that the entirety of this series will total somewhere around 2M words. I'll be writing it for the better part of two decades. It spans twelve books, whose titles I already more-or-less know:

The Wall of Imanti

The Goddess of Love

The Land of Cedars

The Book of Storms

The Dirge of Thunder

The Throne of Draus

The Palace of Rain

The Bow of Nur

The Gate of Drought

The Heart of Hani'ata

The Queen of Darkness

The House of Dust

There's a reason for the naming convention! All of these come either directly or adapted from the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia that's considered the earliest surviving piece of notable literature in the world. Ancient Mesopotamia played a key role in inspiring the setting of this series, so it felt right to honor it with a context-appropriate naming style.

And so the journey has begun. And if you have questions about this series, fire away! I am an epic nerd (in many senses of the word, if you couldn't tell already) and will happily chat for hours 😆