Epic Urban Fantasy. With Knights.

I’m here today to introduce you all to my new epic urban fantasy series Paragons!

Paragons is a web serial. Every Friday, I’ll add new chapters, which you can read for free right here on my website.

Series Overview

Every year, the Government rounds up thirty sixteen-year-olds and chains them to the Spirit Trees. Those Chosen arise forever changed. They’re now something magical. Something supernatural. They’re the champions who will beat the Curse and save the world.

They are the Knights of Gaia.

Like every teenager, Savannah Winters has spent her entire life dreaming of the day she would become a Knight. She’s spent every waking hour studying, training, performing—anything she could do to convince the Government to put her on that elite list.

But she doesn’t make the cut.

Paragons is an urban fantasy tale of chivalrous knights, snarky heroes, court drama—and one forsaken girl’s epic journey to defy the naysayers and seize her destiny.

Backstory

Ok, now let’s dive into a bit of the backstory behind this fantasy story.

It all started a few years ago. At the time, I was living in Sydney, Australia (note: most of Paragons plays out here). Life was awesome…

Photo: Darling Harbour, taken from the Pyrmont Bridge. Sydney Vivid 2018.

…and then the pandemic hit. That totally put the brakes on life, didn’t it? My kids were stuck at home, experiencing the disaster of online learning, and I was experiencing it right along with them, every step of the way. I was basically on-call all day long to help them with their schoolwork, as well as the million computer/technical issues that popped up every day. Getting any work done became basically impossible, and everyone was feeling pretty isolated and alone. You guys remember what that was like, right?

But at the same time my writing output stalled, my creativity surged. That’s the upside when the world goes completely sideways. Total paradigm shift. New experiences lead to a lot of what-ifs. And what-ifs are totally writers’ bread and butter.

All the restrictions. All the fear. All the loneliness. And, most of all, the need for hope. And happy endings. Anyone who’s read my books knows that I throw a lot of adversity at my characters, but they always persevere. They always keep fighting for that happy ending.

That’s where Paragons comes in. I guess you could call it Post-Pandemic Fantasy. When the series begins, the world is still living in the aftermath of the Curse that hit sixteen years ago. The population is reduced, isolated, living in little pockets of civilization. But there’s hope because every year, thirty teenagers gain magic and become Knights, the only ones who can fight the Curse and save humanity.

Ok, so I had an idea. And I started writing it. It just took a while because our world was also still living through a curse of our own.

Photo: Kangaroos & Wallabies (yes, you can pet them). At the Walkabout Wildlife Sanctuary. Calga, NSW, Australia. 2017.

“You’re Rewriting That Book Again?”

Eventually, I had a first draft. I shared it with my kids (actually, I guess they’re teenagers now, yikes!) and awaited their feedback. I was writing about young people, so I really wanted to know how they had experienced and processed the pandemic. I wanted this to be authentic.

I got loads of comments. Whiteboards full of comments and even more hours of discussions. It’s funny how different my two children see things.

My son is very analytical. Very technical. His comments concentrated mostly on the logistics of how things would work in this post-Curse world. We discussed if the trains could run, how the Government made power, how the people got supplies…oh, and the Knights’ helmets! You see, the Knights are supposed to wear helmets whenever they’re in public, so the public sees them as knights, not people. You won’t believe how many times my son spotted a facial expression on a Knight who was wearing a helmet. Obviously, that doesn’t work at all. I did one whole pass on the book just checking for helmets and wayward facial expressions.

My daughter comments on very different things than her brother. She wants detailed physical descriptions so she can see the characters and what they’re wearing. She wants to know the different traits of the six Knight Tribes (and has already picked out which one she’d be in). She wants to know if people in this world still get to have pets for companionship. She’s pretty knowledgeable about trends and current slang, so she’s quick to point out places where I need to use more authentically-teenage expressions. Oh, and she’s always pushing for more drama and romance.

Note: there is romance (duh, it’s one of my books), but it develops slowly.

Photo: A few of my whiteboard notes & my daughter’s hilarious comments (in pink).

Ok, so after I got all that feedback, I made changes. There were a few more drafts, which is unusual for me. I’ve written so many books by now that I usually know exactly how I’m going to approach a book. I write an outline, then a detailed outline, bit by bit adding in more details…until I have the book. I’m an OCD plotter, so I rarely have to delete more than a few hundred words here and there.

This project was different because I was trying out a new form (more about that later), a new angle (teenage prospective), and I really wanted to incorporate the experiences, ideas, and questions my kids had contributed. After all, they are experts in living through a pandemic as a child/teenager.

Also, my husband had lots of comments of his own. Which meant lots more rewriting. By this point, my kids’ tagline had become: “You’re rewriting that book again?”

Divide and Conquer (Your Reading Quest)!

I had the story world all figured out, but there’s one major comment I had from both my kids that informed my decision to turn this project into a serial. They said, “Mom, people have zero attention span nowadays. And no time to read.”

Yeah, we all seem to have less and less time nowadays, don’t we? But I think it’s not that people don’t have enough time to read; many simply only ger little tiny little nuggets of time. We’re always rushing off to work, to school, to the grocery store, to our next work project or the next item on our to-do list. We have a few minutes here or there, maybe sitting on the train during the work/school commute, or while waiting at the doctor’s office, or during a lunch break, or even just before bed.

With this in mind, I decided to try something different with this series. Instead of turning it into a series of lots of big novels (the movie approach), I decided to turn those novels into seasons and populate them with individual episodes, each with several chapters. Like in TV shows, especially more modern shows, each episode has its own story (in Savannah’s case, a mystery to solve or a quest to complete), but there’s progression. All the episodes contribute to the larger story arc of the season. And of course the characters develop and grow from episode to episode.

My goal was to give time-strapped people small, satisfying pieces to read whenever they have a few minutes they want to fill with entertainment. And if you’re one of those lucky readers who has more time, you can totally binge-read the series. My fans tend to do that with my books. 🙂

Book Release: What to Expect

Season 1 of Paragons, entitled The Knights of Gaia, has 12 episodes, one for each month of the year. I’ll post one or more chapters each and every Friday. You can check the series page every Friday. You can also sign up to my newsletter to get a mail with the links.

I’ve also written a bunch of books in my other series, so get ready for a lot of new of new releases from me this year.

Photo: Some of my book series.

Ok, I hope that was imformative. Now I’ll stop babbling, so you can read!