The Relevation Trilogy

Hi All

Welcome to The Relevation Trilogy (TRT) Blog. This is my first ever blog, so all manner of chaos could descend at any moment. I’ll be honest – I have no idea what to write that might actually be interesting to readers. I looked at a few other author blogs and none of them inspired me, unless you like reading about the trials of choosing a good breakfast cereal, or are happy to wade through countless ads and promotions to try to find something of value.

But, having thought about it until my tiny brain hurt, I decided to write blogs based on 4 main topics: Place, Culture, Theme and Writers Workshop.

Place – I’ll summarise key details and provide tidbits of extra information in regards to important locations visited in TRT.

Culture – I’ll dive into more detail about the different cultures that occupy the landscapes of Ostamp.

Theme – When I planned TRT, I didn’t have any preconceptions about what themes the book would touch on, but rather wanted to let things develop organically. Turns out, quite a few themes popped up. For example: the types of societies that might develop along the spectrum of patriarchal to matriarchal; the variety of parent-child relationships (especially father-child) that exist; the role of religion in society; dealing with mental illness under trying circumstances etc.  

Writers Workshop – This will be a broad topic area covering how I write, what I’ve learned about writing style, what steps you have to go through to independently publish a book etc.

I’ll aim to post one blog per month on one of these topics. I’ll likely touch on the origin of certain names and words, and the inspiration behind some of the content.

For those of you that have read When Darkness Descends, you can use the comments section on blog posts to suggest themes or issues you’d like to see me cover in future blogs. I imagine you’ve got a few questions and I’m happy to answer as many of them as possible without giving away plot details that would spoil the upcoming books for readers.

This journey began for me 38 years ago when I started writing a fantasy novel on a beaten-up, second-hand typewriter. At the time, I was reading books like (you would never guess) The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (Stephen Donaldson) and Magician (Raymond Feist). My school friends and I would spend many weekends in the cinema watching the Star Wars films (the originals – and still the best), any John Carpenter horror movie, or basically anything fantasy, sci-fi or horror related (anybody remember The Dark Crystal?). Starburst Magazine was also required reading material if you didn’t want to be excommunicated from the circle of friends.

All of these influences inspired my story-writing in some way, and I punched out around 100 pages of the novel when I was 15 years old. Cutting a long story short, all that work was lost and I went off to live a life that had nothing to do with creative writing.

However, the story I began 38 years ago never left me. Over the years, I kept a notebook of ideas and character profiles, and then pages and pages of draft text until finally I began writing properly around 3 years ago.

It seemed all the pent-up creativity couldn’t wait to come pouring out, and I finished the first drafts of all three books of TRT within 3 years (totalling around 400,000 words). Writers block? What’s that?

When Darkness Descends is the first, and shortest, book in the trilogy. Although it’s finished, I keep thinking I could have written more or written some bits differently. Maybe one day I will. I imagine those types of thoughts plague authors endlessly. And I’m still finding typos after umpteen reads! It seems these never, ever disappear. I just finished reading His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman – the 2011 Hardcover Edition of a book first published in 1995, and I found a couple of spelling errors in that, so I’m convinced that perfection is impossible.

The title of the three books of TRT form a sentence: When darkness descends, at the end of everything, she will rise. The first book introduces you to the world of Ostamp, the second drags you down into some dark places to which there seems no way out, and the third shows you there was a way out after all, if you keep the faith.

I’m currently working on the 3^rd draft of Book 2, which should be ready to publish around May 2021. The first draft of Book 3 is also complete. I had to finish this before publishing Book 1 because I needed to know how things ended up. The very end of the story impacts some of the narrative at the very beginning. 

Anyway, I’ve prattled on about not very much for too long. I hope you enjoy this journey as much as I have.

The next blog will be about the land of Enthilen. GWL