Fifth book in the series. The other four are written (but not revised), and I’m almost ten percent of the way through this one…
AND TODAY I found the primary subtheme of the entire five-book arc.
It’s been there all along. It’s been there since the first scene of the first novel in the first draft.
It’s been in every single book.
But TODAY is the first day I saw it — and it took a time-traveling smack on the back of the head from my seventh-grade Ohio History class over at West Branch Junior High back when I was thirteen years old to make me see it.
Parts of what this series and this world I’m building are about have been clear to me from the start. I love Ohio, I have always loved Ohio, and in the forty years I was away from it, I never stopped missing it. This is the dirt I was made of, and the place that made my ancestors even back before this was a state.
That love was, and is, and will be the baseline on which the series is built. Love of a place long-lost, never forgotten, and finally regained.
Not the same when you return as you remembered… because you didn’t see a lot of what was here when you were little.
But some parts of this series have come leaping out at me and grabbed me.
This just slipped up behind me and whispered in my ear… and then chuckled before disappearing back into my subconscious mind.
It’s a huge plot point, so I can’t even hint, dammit.
But it was beautiful to discover what the part of me that works without telling me what’s its doing has been doing while I’ve been writing the parts I DO know about.
I love this job. It’s a nutty, weird job. But I love it.
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