Combining Two Books Into One

And healing from negative fan reactions after

Sorry I’m a bit slower with posts lately. We’ve had a time in the Dennard house. Nothing catastrophic! But some asthma flare-up issues combined with starting a new school combined with…

Cricket having an absolutely horrifying allergic reaction to mosquito bites so then her eyes swelled shut. She was like this for four days. 😱

She’s okay now! And finally back to school with only mild swelling in her eyes now. But phew. Y’all, it was so scary! Not to mention so painful and miserable for her.

But be warned, parents of small children! Apparently this is super common in 1-5 year olds. If they get bug bites on their face, their eyes can swell shut in reaction. 😓

Now onto the main post! It’s a long one! 😬

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Me in 2021 personalizing preorders of Witchshadow at Schuler Books.

Casey asked:

Hey, Sooz, just a quick question. I just finally read Witchshadow (it was so good!) and I know you've talked a lot about squashing two books into one for it. I was curious if the format you chose (the not entirely linearly/initial time jump) was always the plan or something you chose to do because you had to squash (or a bit of both?), since it's different from the other books.

Ah, Witchshadow. My tricky book that derailed everything in my life and career.

Yes, that sounds dramatic, but you’ll see what I mean as you read on.

Because yes, I did want two books for Iseult. For reasons on the publishing backend, we chose not to go that way, however. At that time, back in 2018, I thought it would be manageable. I’m a problem-solver! It’s one of my favorite parts of writing!

But it turned out to be so, so much harder than I expected.

And hilariously, this not a quick question at all—which is fine! I actually am thrilled you asked so I can dive into it the full backstory. In some ways, it’s healing for me to finally write about it in full.

I also hope it might help other writers faced with a similar conundrums:

1. The first of having to smash two books together.

2. And the second of facing a negative fan reaction and having to come back from that emotionally.

But let’s back up to the beginning.

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VERY LIGHT SPOILERS FOR THE WITCHLANDS SERIES AHEAD. BEWARE.

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About the Witchlands

The Witchlands is a sprawling series. I mean sprawling.

It is intentionally the kind of meaty fantasy I grew up reading, and it’s quite honestly a love letter to every massive fantasy series of the 80s and 90s that so consumed me as a reader.¹

It has seven points of view (not including short POVs that pop in and out), three empires (and many more smaller nations), approximately 437 billions kinds of magic, and so many complex plot threads I literally have multiple boxes of index cards.

If you’ve read the books, you know what I’m talking about.

But as if all of that wasn’t complicated enough for my single brain, I decided to set myself a challenge: I would make each book about a different character’s arc. (I talked about this at length here.)

In theory, this seemed like a cool challenge. So for example, Windwitch was built around Merik, meaning that I had to make sure every POV character learned a similar lesson to what he had to learn. Seems easy enough on the surface, but in fact required serious plot finagling to pull off. Oh, he’s got to learn he fully misunderstood his enemy and they should be his ally? Welp, gotta get every other POV with an enemy now too!

Oh, Aeduan in Bloodwitch has to learn how to exist without the power that has always defined him? Well, how can I make everyone else powerless too?

Guys: don’t do this to yourself.

I mean, really. There was no reason for me to do this. It’s a cool challenge, but that’s also what it ended up being: A CHALLENGE.

It also made every book harder to write than the one before it. (I won’t rehash why, you can head here for more on that.)

This leads me to everyone’s favorite Threadwitch, Iseult det Midenzi. She, it turned out, had a lot more growing to do than the others.

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About Iseult

Fun fact: Iseult was the reason I wrote this series.

I heard the word Threadwitch one night as I was about to fall asleep, and I jolted awake, grabbed my phone, and started jotting down ideas about her. A young woman who had the ability to see emotions as thread-like colors over people. It would be so overwhelming! She’d always be putting other peoples’ feelings first and never understanding her own.

It would also be pretty feared and hated magic to have. Seeing so much information about every person you meet? Yeah, I would not want someone to know my state of mind all the time!

I literally built the cast and world around Iseult.²

What I learned about Iseult as I wrote the series was that she actually had two core wounds that needed healing:

1. She had to reckon with the hatred of her magic by others and her own growing hatred for the truth of her particular Threadwitchery.

2. She also had to reckon with her concept of “stasis” and letting herself feel her own emotions—which was all rooted in some serious baggage with her mom. I mean, a lot of baggage.

To give Iseult the space I felt she needed to learn those lessons, I eventually decided she needed two books.

One book would be journey in Cartorra with Safi, where Iseult could learn about magic and grapple with its true nature. The second book would be a journey with her mother in a Nomatsi tribe in Arithuania.

Obviously, that didn’t quite happen, but you can see—if you’ve read Witchshadow—how I ended up with the bones of what eventually became a single book.

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Two Arcs, One Book

The thing about books is that they have a natural shape to them. A rhythm we expect—at least in western society—of how stories should flow. You’ve likely seen the rising tension graph:

And to deviate from this comes with risks. Risks I frankly didn’t want to take. I personally like this shape of story. I like consuming it, I like creating it.³

That meant I couldn’t just write two books and then smash them together. Because then I’d have a single book shaped like this:

No, no, no. That wouldn’t do.

To complicate things further, I also had so many reveals that had to happen over the course of Iseult’s book(s).

Remember: I was five books in at this point. I was at the part of my series arc where earned payoffs were starting to happen. No more setup—now the readers need resolutions.

So add that to the ongoing issue of a double character arc for Iseult…

Yeah. I was stuck. It felt like someone had handed me a thousand piece puzzle, but the entire thing was white. So I had to piece it all together without any image to go by or colors to offer clues.

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The Solution

I spent months and months and months trying out different versions of this book. I would write huge chunks and then just…flounder because always I ran into the same issue.

I just could not accomplishing enough in each scene.

In other words, I couldn’t follow the usual kill 1-2 plot birds with each scene. I had to instead kill 3-4 plot birds with each scene.

Out of desperation, I finally hopped on a Zoom call with my friends Alex Bracken and Erin Bowman. I don’t really like tapping people to brainstorm for the Witchlands because it is SO complicated—and I don’t expect my friends to have read the books. But I was truly desperate and truly behind, so to Zoom I turned.⁴

In hindsight, it probably helped they didn’t know a whole lot about the series. It meant they could just sling ideas at me that someone immersed in the lore and plot might not suggest. And one of things Alex suggested was rather than try to accomplish all two book ideas chronologically, what if I started after everything had fallen apart and just relayed key moments in flashbacks.

As a rule, I’m not a fan of flashbacks. I used them sparingly, and my agent really had to push me to use them the way I did in Bloodwitch.

But…Alex had a point. I could take my “cookie moments”—the scenes I’d been daydreaming for Iseult for so many years—and make those the only scenes we see in Cartorra.

It wasn’t my ideal scenario (that would still have been to have two books), but I definitely saw a way it could at least work.

So I sat down, dropping Iseult in medias res after things have fallen apart for her in Cartorra. It felt good. I liked her rage. I liked how complicated everything was—and not just for her, but for Safi too.

Did it mean readers might struggle a bit at first? As they tried to figure out what was going on? Sure.

But if you read the Witchlands, you’re smart. I know you are to have kept up with all the twisting, turning plot and characters and world for so many books.

So I trusted that readers could keep up. And thus, my solution was found.

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Aftermath

I know that the response to Witchshadow was mixed after it released.

And I won’t lie: it hurt so much at the time. I got a few angry fan emails/messages telling me I’d ruined the series by not having certain POV appear. I got tagged in posts saying the book was too hard to follow, and why weren’t X character and Y character together?

I get it. I understand those responses.

But I also had worked so, so hard for so, so long. So to see some fans be disappointed broke my heart.

It really did. This is not an exaggeration, and it was a big reason I stopped writing in the Witchlands for as long as I did.

I wanted to please everyone with that book. I didn’t. And that sense of letting people down…

Well, it took me a really, really long time to recover from that.

Not to mention, I wrote Witchshadow while I was going through IVF, had a miscarriage, had a near-death delivery, and was dealing with a newborn all by myself during 2020 Covid (I was so stressed, I even gave myself shingles trying to meet deadlines three months postpartum).

To then have a vocal minority of fans tell me I’d let them down—and some of them in VERY unkind terms…

Guys, it really sucked.

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Continued Aftermath

Now, years later, I can give myself—and the readers—a lot more grace.

I get why they didn’t love Witchshadow as much as Bloodwitch, which was a much more romance-driven book. And I get why they found the story complicated and difficult to track with the alternating timelines.

If I could go back to 2018, I would not agree to only one book for Iseult. Not merely because I would have preferred to be able to execute my original vision, but because also I am still dealing with the aftermath of that choice to keep it contained in one book!

There were so many plot reveals and twists I couldn’t get to in Witchshadow, to the point that now Witchlight is basically—yet again—two books finagled into one.

Okay, make that 1.5 books. It’s not nearly as complicated a puzzle as Witchadow was.⁵

It also helps that I’ve had more time to troubleshoot. Writing the entire Luminaries trilogy before finishing Witchlight actually let my brain do a lot of the hard work below the surface. My subconscious has been churning through ideas for a few years, so when it came time to finally draft Witchlight in full, I was much more prepared.

Plus, I’ve had the help of my amazing brainstorm buddy again (hey Rachel) as well as my agent (hey Jo!).

AND, perhaps most important of all, writing the entire Luminaries trilogy gave me time to heal.

I needed to heal from the trauma of IVF, miscarriage, near-death, and a newborn during Covid. I needed to disentangle all that baggage and PTSD from the Witchlands.⁶

And I needed to remember that for every one fan who disliked Witchshadow, there were far more who loved it. Don’t their opinions matter too? And what about the ones who say it’s their favorite book in the series? Theirs are the voices I need to remember!

We authors can’t please everyone; we all know that. But sometimes it’s hard to extricate ourselves from that truth—especially if a book is wrapped up in extra external hardship.

So there you have it, Casey. That was the long, winding story of how I made two books into one—and how I’m kind of doing it all over again.

But to end on a high note: I can safely say I learned more about my craft as a writer with Witchshadow than any book that came before.

It forced me to push my skills to another level, which quite honestly gave me the confidence to tackle The Luminaries, a book that is so stylistically different than anything I’d done before.

Finally, to wrap this up on one more high note: thank you to all the Witchlanders out there. Thanks for sticking with the series, with the characters, and above all with me.

You cannot possibly know how much I appreciate you.

And yes, I include the ones who were upset with me in that appreciation. Because I understand why you feel let down, and I’m genuinely sorry to have caused you disappointment.

But I really do believe that Witchlight will give you the conclusion⁷ you’re hoping for. I’m so darn proud of it.

💚 - Sooz

1. When I learned Robin Hobb blurbed Truthwitch, I actually went weak in the knees and slumped down to my kitchen floor in shock. I mean, MY HERO! Reading my book! And enjoying it enough to write a quote and put her name on it! I still get chills when I think about this.

2. Her name was actually Sorsha in the first version, but wisely, my editor had me change it because two S names—Sorsha and Safi—were hard to track when they were always together. Side note: I did not anticipate Vivia and Vaness having entire books together! So I regret giving them two V names. 🙃

3. There are plenty of authors out there who can deviate and deviate well. I’ve just yet to see a project where I felt it would work for me.

4. This isn’t totally true. I love brainstorming with my buddy Rachel (you’re the best!), but she was living abroad at the time with minimal internet. And so her patient listening and idea-bouncing ears were not available.

5. Honestly, this should have been an eight book series.

6. Therapy helped me a lot with this. I could not do it alone.

7. Or is it, perhaps, a new beginning…cough, cough