Chapter 11 - Jeff Wheeler

If you hate waiting for the next book in a series, Jeff Wheeler is the author for you! On average, Jeff writes a series a year. How, you might ask? Maybe it's magic, just like his books. 

https://jeff-wheeler.com/ 

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Emma: Writing a novel is a big accomplishment. So how about publishing over forty? Jeff Wheeler, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Kingfountain series, Muirwood series, The Invisible College, and more, is here with me today. Hey, Jeff. Thank you so much for coming in.

Jeff: It's my pleasure, Emma. Thanks for having me.

Emma: Tell me a little bit more about yourself.

Jeff: Well, people have wondered, "how do you write full-time? How do you do those things?" Well, I had another day job first. I used to work in the tech industry for Intel Corporation, but I've always wanted to be a writer. But it's hard to make it in that industry today. So I always wrote on the side, always was telling stories, always trying to do those things. And about twelve years ago, I got my big break. And then about ten years ago, I was able to leave my day job at Intel and write full-time after that. And so it's totally changed my life to be able to do something that was a hobby before and now is my career. It's just been the best thing in the world that's happened to me.

Emma: And before we started, you told me that you write four books a year on average.

Jeff: That's true. So, yeah, I was writing, like, one book a year. And then when I got my publishing deal with Amazon Publishing, I said I could write more, I could write faster if I had more time. And so we worked out one of my contracts so that I would turn them in quicker and was able to just work that out where I was able to write three books a year. And then just over the last few years, I've just been able to increase it to four books a year now. So it's a pretty fast pace for a lot of authors, but I know authors that can write one a month almost. And so it's just—it's crazy how the industry today allows authors to be able to do that instead of being constrained to the publishing schedule of a publisher that maybe might be able to do one book a year or a book every other year. It really depends on the author, how quickly they can write.

Emma: Now that writing is your full-time job, does it feel as fun as it used to be?

Jeff: Well, absolutely. I mean, it's... I tell people that the worst day being an author is still better than the best day I had working at the other job. But if you push yourself too much, it can become difficult. Like, you know, I tried to find the pace that I could handle comfortably, and I found that stride. I found that pace. If I try speeding it up, I get more exhausted. The ideas stop flowing as well. And so for me, being able to find the pace that I can maintain comfortably, kind of like a runner would. Like, I can run at this speed comfortably, then I can maintain that pace as long as I take breaks when I need to. But I've had to find what that pace looks like for me.

Emma: As a full-time writer, what does your daily schedule look like?

Jeff: That's a question a lot of people ask, but especially if any of these listeners are aspiring authors, that's the question they really wanna know, right, is "what were you doing with your day job and having to balance everything?" Back then, when I was working at Intel, I would write one day a week. And so I had one evening kinda set apart, you know, maybe from seven to ten PM, that my wife would put the kids to bed, I wouldn't take any calls, I wouldn't schedule anything else. I would have dedicated, focused writing time.

And so when I was doing that, I could write one chapter a week, and then on average, about one book a year. I wanted more. We could have easily done more than that. But with all the priorities I had and all the conflicting demands on time and attention, you know, church things and family things and work commitments, that was the time I was able to say as long as I'm writing, I'm scratching that itch enough to be able to do that.

Right now, I write three days a week. So Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. In fact, I wrote my chapter before I came here today. I can write a chapter in about two hours. I still spend a lot of time answering emails, working on marketing things. There's a newsletter. There's lots of different things that I'm involved with that still take up time, but my dedicated writing time, I like doing Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It gives me a break in between them, and I have just found that pace for creating new material works out well. And then I'll do afternoons, maybe edit like, last week, I was doing a lot of edits on another book that's gonna be coming out later this summer. I don't mix that editing time versus creative time because I use a different part of my brain editing when I do that.

So that's kind of the way it works. It's kind of a Monday through Friday job. I don't typically write over the weekends. But I do typically write on holidays, and, you know, if something falls on that, I might switch a writing day. But I try to do three chapters a week, and that means I can write a book in about three months.

Emma: I was going to ask about the editing process, because writing is difficult enough, but then going through the whole editing... While you're writing a different book, are you editing the one you wrote previously, or how does that work?

Jeff: Yes. I do not edit something while I'm writing it because it just—it takes a totally different part of my brain. And so I focus on the new content in the new book that I'm working on, then I'm often at different stages of editorial with the other books. So at the previous one and the one before that, I can have sometimes three different books in the queue at the same time. And that can be challenging, switching from one fantasy world to another one, and then having to remember, okay, what what was I trying to do with this book? And then trying to keep the new ideas from jumping up to say, "write me next." Yeah, I kinda have to hold those back. But, yeah, I have to separate those.

But that's why I work on editing typically in the afternoon for a previous thing, but I do not edit at all the current book until I'm done writing it. And then I'll go back and read it again from the beginning and kinda get the experiences how a reader would do it because obviously, a reader can go through a book faster than I can write it. And so I have to make sure the pacing works out well for that particular book.

Emma: I bet your readers love you, though, because that's the worst, waiting for a book in a series to come out. So if you can get them out pretty fast, that's wonderful.

Jeff: It is. And I still have readers who complain. It's like, "oh, I have to wait four months." You know?

Emma: It's better than a year or two.

Jeff: I know. Some writers, you know, it's years in between books. And so the people have to wait a long time. So I have people complain. Most of them are happy with it, and some, like, there's a lot of readers binge read books.

So they'll wait for the whole series to come out before they start. And they know with me, they don't have a long wait. They can maybe wait a year, and then they can read all of them, kinda back to back, and that they don't have to have that wait. And so I like the fact that whatever works for the reader is fine. If you wanna wait, that's great. But I have enough of a backlist that if they find me in one series, there's so many books that they can go through and binge to kinda catch up to where I am today. It can take them a little while.

Emma: That's one of the nice things, I think, about being more in control of your publishing, because there was this one series that I read when I was a kid that I absolutely loved, and there were four books, and the fifth book didn't come out until, like, ten years later. And it was because of the publishing company, they didn't want to publish that book at that time for whatever reason. And so then, years later, the author had to buy back the rights to publish the fifth book.

Jeff: Yeah. That happens. It can be really challenging to reacquire your rights again. And so, yeah, that's the thing, especially if the author wants to continue the series, the publisher didn't wanna continue the series. But I'm glad that in today's market, authors have more power and the ability to reclaim rights or to wait for certain clauses of the contract to expire that allows those rights to revert back to them. So it's definitely a more author-friendly environment today than it was ten plus years ago.

Emma: Tell me more about indie publishing, because you started publishing your own books, and then you had a contract with Amazon. Is that correct?

Jeff: Yes. So my story's different, but every author I know has their own story and has a unique way of how they found their path, whether it's through the traditional publishing with the kind of the big five publishers in New York. They're the ones that publish the majority of those mainstream books. And then how indie has become very popular because of Amazon creating the platforms like Kindle and, you know, you don't have to occupy a bookshelf space. You can have a digital book, you know, downloaded to your device in seconds, and people like that.

So I started off the traditional route trying to get a publishing deal, and I got rejected by, like, 50 different agents. Went through all of that, and so then I decided to go the indie route and began self publishing my Muirwood series. And that's kind of the breakthrough series where I was discovered, because fans started finding it.

I published all three books simultaneously to take advantage of that binge-reading aspect, right? I tried selling the first book, and so I said, well, I'm just gonna keep writing book two, and I'll keep writing book three even though I haven't sold book one yet. So I'd finished all three, decided to indie publish them, and readers started discovering it. And little did I know that the folks at Amazon were watching the algorithms, and also little did I know that in addition to providing the self-publishing platform, they had created their own publishing companies. So they created one for thrillers. They would create one for, you know, romance, and then they finally decided to do science fiction and fantasy. And I was one of the first authors that they acquired. So they hired an editor out of, you know, one of the major publishers, and I was one of the first authors that he picked up.

And so they came to me. I didn't even submit anything to them. They signed for those three books that I had self-published, and they asked what I was working on next. I said I'm working on another trilogy. They bought those too. So I've been with Amazon publishing, you know, ever since then.

Emma: Wow. That's amazing. So you said you write three days a week. How do you keep that time just for writing time and eliminate distractions so you can be productive and finish your chapters?

Jeff: Well, that's a wonderful question. And authors have different techniques for doing this. Some authors like to listen to a soundtrack or a playlist as they write. I can't do that. I get too easily distracted.

And one of the classes that I teach is called "The Flow of Writing," because that's something—a concept I learned about while I was at Intel. And working in a tech company, they really prize being productive, right? They want you to be as efficient as possible. They want you to find innovative ways of doing things faster, and that became part of my DNA as an author too. I looked at what's the shortest amount of time it would take to write a chapter. You know, like, if I had eight hours, I could take it at eight hours. But how can I get it done in three? Well, how can I get it done in two? How can I get it done in an hour and a half?

And so I began to experiment and learn, like, okay. How do I get in a flow state? And if you don't know what that is, there's a great YouTube video that you can watch from a TED Talk by a scientist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And you can look up the flow state on Google and you and you'll find it. And he talked about that they've documented different ways of getting into this flow state.

And so I started just observing for myself. Okay. How am I getting into a flow state? What's going on? And I found that certain things were distracting me, like an email. Every time an email would come in, my computer would chirp. And then that would make me go, what was that email? Well, most of it's spam anyways, right? But, you know, things like that would distract me. So, okay, I gotta make sure my email's turned off. Well, then social media. You know, I got a Facebook post where somebody likes it, and a little chime would come on. And so that would distract me. So I'm like, well, I gotta make sure all my notifications are turned off. And then I'd notice oh, I hear the traffic going by my house. So I bought a white noise machine just to create a little bit of white noise to help blot out that sound. So I just kept adding on.

So what I do right now is I always make sure my phone's turned off. I make sure my email, social media's turned off. I have a white noise machine on, and I have noise cancelling headphones. Now I know that sounds a little weird to create noise that you're cancelling, but it doesn't cancel all of it. But what I found with the headphones and with the white noise machine, it kinda puts my brain in this very open receptive state where I'm able to just think about the chapter I'm writing, and then all of a sudden, it's like two hours later, it's done. I've written the number of words it needs to be. I find that nice end, and I look at the clock, and it's been maybe two hours, maybe a little less, maybe a little more. But on average, like, if I'm writing an action scene, those tend to flow faster, and I can write that at maybe an hour and a half. And if there's a lot of dialogue or there's some emotional intensity going on, I tend to write a little bit slower for those chapters. And it may be two hours, maybe a little bit longer. But on average, I have found that by not having those distractions, I do that.

And, you know, my wife wanted to tell the story because she does reselling of, like, clothes and things, and she needed to package up some things. And her printer is in the den where I write. And she's like, "I didn't go in there and bug you because I knew that that would pull you out of your flow state." So she was waiting for me to be done, and she watched me turn off the thing and pull off my headphones, and she came rushing right in to print out the labels to ship the things that she had sold that day. I appreciate that.

And my kids know, like, when the door's closed and they see my headset on, they know that I'm writing. And so, like, unless it's an emergency, they don't come in because it's easy to get pulled out of a flow state, and then it takes you longer to come back in. And I've heard this from so many other authors, that either spouses or their family just assume, "oh, you're working from home. You can run a quick errand for me. You can do these things for me." But actually, getting pulled out of that flow state is really... It can be really difficult to get back in it again. And so we appreciate having those boundaries of being able to, "no, I'm really working." And this is a lot of concentration that needs to happen.

Emma: And then when you're able to get that chapter done, then you have more time to spend with your family and other things.

Jeff: Absolutely. I get to go to my kids' sports games, you know, either soccer or tennis or whatever. I get to go out to lunch with my wife. I definitely have more time to spend with the family now than I did when I was at a company forty-five minutes away, all the time I'm spending on the road. I have so much more time with my family now. And most of my kids are old enough now that they vaguely remember me having the day job when I was gone every day, and so they kinda take for granted now that, no, dad's at home, and he's there to talk to and ask questions to and be there for them. So I love that. It gives me that balance with my family, like, I get more time than I've ever had with them before.

Emma: Because you have so many series... I don't know if you work on one at a time or if you're working on several books at the same time... Do you have any tips for keeping all your different series and ideas organized?

Jeff: Oh, that's a really good question, and people ask me this a lot.

The first part of the question is I only work on one series at a time. So if I get a new idea... In fact, I just got one this weekend watching a movie, and I'll write down that idea and I'll send it to myself in an email, and then I'll file it away. I won't look at it again because I want to capture the idea in case I might want to write this someday in the future. And I kind of have this book ideas folder in my Gmail account that captures those things, but I really try to focus my energy on what am I writing now. And usually, when I come to the end of the series is when I'll start thinking about what do I wanna do next. And so I definitely try to do that.

But then there's the question, how do you organize everything? And there's so many different ways that authors do it. When I was in my undergrad—I have a bachelor's degree in history, medieval history. So a lot of my story ideas are prompted by old abbeys and castles and swords and armor and a lot of my... it's kind of epic fantasy is what I tend to write the most.

And so, my brain is wired different than other authors are, that I keep a lot of the stuff in my head because, like, I can recite the Kings of England from, like, 1066 to 1485. I know most of the dynasties and I know most of the kings and so my brain naturally organizes the stuff. And so when I'm writing something that's based on maybe a certain era of our own history, and I'm taking creative liberties with it and inventing a new, maybe, fantasy world out of it, people will say, "how do you keep it straight?" Well, I know the history already behind those things.

And so, sometimes, what I'll have to do, like, especially when I'm writing it, when I create the outline of what I'm doing, it's not like a hard outline. It's more of a synopsis of, like, here's the journey that these characters are gonna go on, and here's kind of the major beginning, middle, and end for each of the book. Because I do all that in advance. And so I'll start writing the first book and then I'll go back and I'll look at the document again. Like, okay. Where did I end up? Did I end up where I thought I was gonna end up? Because sometimes, I wrapped up the book earlier than I thought because it just felt like it was a better place to end the story at this kind of spot where it has kind of a completion of a certain part of the arc that I wanted to do. So I'll go back and I'll reread. Okay. Where am I going next? So it's kinda like I'm charting a road trip. Like, maybe I'm gonna drive from here to New York City, and I'm planning on going here and here and here on the way there. But I'll check in because maybe I'll do a little detour somewhere else. But if I know I'm ending up in New York City, I allow myself to make those detours along the way as long as I kinda end up where I was intending to go, and I'm able to complete that journey and deliver kind of the emotional arc that I was intending to do for these characters and for this series, if that makes sense.

Emma: When you start a series, do you generally have an idea of how many books you want in the series?

Jeff: Yes. Absolutely. So it's been popular over the years to write trilogies. But some of my books are four books long. Some are five. Some have series that kind of follow each other, that go to maybe nine or ten different books interrelated to each other. And then, I like to cross over my worlds, where characters or magic or things that fans can suddenly stumble into and they'll recognize like, "oh, this is from, you know, Fireblood series," or "this is from Muirwood and it's crossed over with Kingfountain." Readers love that. They love having that interconnectedness and that richness to it. And I love coming up with stuff like that that I hadn't planned on before. But if I see ways of tying things in together, I think it just makes it a funner experience for the reader to be able to recognize things that they know about. And if they don't, then they're gonna wanna go read the other series that talks about it so they can kind of be in the know of what's going on. So that's something that I love to do and I try to do.

And so each series, when I'm starting it out, I think about what's the journey that's happening and how many books will it take to tell that initial journey. And I can maybe add on to it later, but I always go into it, especially when I'm pitching to Amazon, I tell them, here's how many books I'm envisioning the series taking.

Emma: It sounds like you write very sequentially.

Jeff: Absolutely. I start with a prologue, typically, and I write each chapter in sequence. I don't write the middle. I don't start with the end. I know where I wanna go with it, but I'll write the stories just kinda sequentially as it goes. Book one, then book two, then book three, and so forth.

Emma: How many drafts does it usually take you for each book?

Jeff: Well, here's the thing. And I didn't really understand how this worked until I started having a publisher that wanted to be part of the—and most publishers wanna be part of the process. What I found because I, you know, I always did in the earlier times, I always did multiple drafts. Right? And I'd read it again, and I'd fix it, read it again, and fix it. But that's not how I do it now. I have a really strong editorial team that my publisher provides. I also have some early readers that have been friends of mine for, like, decades. And I've known them for just a long time and will rarely add new people to that first reader list. So my process right now is I write the rough draft and turn it in because I know that the ideas that I'm gonna get from my team are gonna help make the story better. And I also know that I can't predict what they're gonna suggest.

And so I write the best story I can write. I don't think about grammar mistakes. I don't think about overusing words. I don't let my editor brain focus on it. I'll finish writing it. I'll reread it and fix maybe a glaring mistake. But most of the times, like, here's the plot. Here's the characters. Here's the story I'm trying to tell. Then I'll hand it over to my early readers, my first readers, and I'll let them take a look at it. You know, I have five different people that love to give me that early feedback, and these are people whose opinions I trust. They're all dedicated readers, and they also are honest with me. It would do me no good at all if they just said, "oh, this is great. I loved everything about it." I need their critical feedback of what worked for them, what didn't work for them, and what do you suggest. And then I also ask them, what do you think's gonna happen next? Because I, you know, I'm not gonna tell them whether they guessed anything right or wrong, but I like to hear, have I tricked them well enough to suspect what's gonna be coming in future books? So I'll get their feedback, but I won't make any changes.

So then, after I've got their feedback, I turn it in to my publisher. So my acquisition editor will read it next, but she won't give me any feedback. I'll work then with my development editor. I didn't even know development editors were a thing until I started working with Amazon and realized, no, this is a core thing. So a development editor, they're not doing, like, typos. They're not doing grammar. They're looking at how is this working together as a whole. Are the characters coming across well? Is the plot coming across? What's working? What's not working? And then they'll provide that detailed feedback. And then I give my development editor all my early reader feedback. So that way, I won't haven't made any change, but that way, they can take their reading experience and then compare it with the early readers and say, what do they agree with, what do they not agree with? And then they come back to my editor at Amazon and me and say, "here's what we want to change."

And so then we just start doing the heavy editing. Because, again, I couldn't have predicted what everyone was gonna say, and I don't wanna just take one person's input. I wanna take everybody's input, and then we get into it. Then we do the second major revision of it.

After that, it goes to my copy editor. And I've been with the same editorial team for a decade now. So they know my body of work. They've read all my books. They know everything about it. And my copy editor can see things that other people haven't seen. They might see inconsistencies in my magic system. They might see that I changed the spelling of a character's name halfway through the book, and nobody noticed it, including me. You know, she provides so much input.

And so then I'll work on incorporating all of that feedback. Then it goes to my proofreader. Again, this is somebody who's been with me for years and years and knows my body of work too, reads it all, and then there's fewer and fewer things to change the further and further along it goes.

So by the time the proofreader's done, you think, "okay. Everything's great. It's all done," but that's not it. The next person reads, it's called the cold reader. And a cold reader is somebody who's never read anything from me at all. And so they might be reading book three of a five book series, cold, right? They don't know anything about me. They don't know anything about my worlds. And guess what? They find things that everybody else missed because they're just looking at the grammar, they're looking at how all those things fit together. They're looking at just inconsistencies. And so, they find stuff. Once it's been through a cold reader, it's ready for the public.

And I hate to say this, but even after all those people, I will still get Facebook messages or emails from fans. "Oh, here's a typo on page 72." And I'll look there. You're right. It's a typo. And all of us missed it. But I'm not striving for perfection. I'm just striving for excellence. I'm trying to create the best book that I can do. And that typo on page 72 doesn't really impact the story all that much. And if it's really egregious, just we'll go back and fix it so that future versions can have that fixed. But most of the time, it's like in Star Wars where a stormtrooper hits his head entering a thing. George Lucas left it in there. He could've taken it out. You leave certain things in there. They're just errors. That stuff happens.

But that's my process. That's what I go through. And without my team, I wouldn't feel comfortable putting a book out into the world where you're gonna have the readers being critical and looking at every single thing, but I feel so much more comfortable that I have all these people helping to support me as an author to tell the best stories that I can tell.

Emma: The reading public can be pretty vicious sometimes.

Jeff: Oh, yeah. I like to save some of my harshest reviews, especially the ones that are really well-written and brutal, because they just make me laugh. Right? It's like, "oh, wow. You were really being mean with this." I save those because I just think they're funny to read. Like, wow. You went out of your way to really, you know, try to put a knife in the author here. But I think it's funny. And I try not to take the criticism too seriously, and I try not to take the praise too seriously.

Emma: Besides, it's easier to write a review than it is to write a whole series.

Jeff: No kidding. Can you do better?

Emma: For sure. Well, tell me about some of your series.

Jeff: You know, I've told you being a history major, most of my books are inspired by an actual event in an actual place. And the series that I've written that just came out a couple of months ago is called The Invisible College, and it's inspired by a time in history that's more modern than medieval. It's not like—it doesn't have the same kind of technology we have today, but it's a fantasy world. The magic system is based on music. And when I pitched it to my editor, I said, "this is kind of Lord of the Rings meets World War I."

And so I went back to the books that inspired Tolkien. He was a professor of ancient literature, and he was inspired to write Lord of the Rings by reading some of these classic tales that were from Scandinavia and places like that that inspired him. So I went back and read some of those things, looking for where could I be inspired. And I found these ideas that I decided to use where instead of using elves, because that that's very common in fantasy today, I wanted to create a race. And so I borrowed from those legends. So they're kinda like elves, but they live in cold environments like glaciers and snow. And so our climate, what we humans live in, are too warm for them. So when they come out and they wanna fight, they wait till winter. They're waiting for the snow. They're waiting for the temperatures to drop.

And so this race of beings called the Aesir have been around for, like, millennia. They have a much longer lifespan than us, but then they also hibernate too. And so they might be gone for a couple hundred years or fifty years or whatever. No one knows when they're gonna wake up, but when they come up, they try to exterminate humans. And so over these centuries and over these millennia that these two races have been fighting with each other, the humans have learned magic and have learned how to create ways to protecting themselves against the Aesir because every time they awaken, a war starts all over again. And they'll fight for a period of time and then they'll go back and hibernate again.

And so I had this idea of creating this society of sorcerers called the Invisible College where that's how magic is passed down. They don't go to school. It's not like a magical school like Harry Potter, but it's more like a secret society where people who are interested, people who are willing to learn math and science and art and all these different things and join the secret society get to learn how to become a sorcerer, get to learn how to use magic. And they're the ones that are trying to help protect the people from the when they wake up.

And so I had this idea based on the story of a famous inventor. I'm not gonna say who it is. I don't want any spoilers yet, but I always reveal my secrets in my author's notes at the end of my books where I start to reveal as the series progress, where did these ideas come from. So that if readers are interested in the period of history or the characters, they can go read more on it. So it's kind of a way of teaching history, but in a fun fantastical way, And a lot of readers appreciate that.

So Invisible College came out in November, and book two, The Violence of Sound, comes out in April. And then the third book in the series comes out later this year.

Emma: If you take inspiration from history... Maybe this is a bad question because I don't know how literal the inspiration is, but people don't usually think of history and then magic in the same way. So how do you add magic into these worlds that are inspired by these historical events?

Jeff: Thank you. That's actually a really good question. And coming up with magic systems is really fun for fantasy authors. When I was in high school, I originally wanted to write thrillers. But then I came to the realization that that takes a lot more research when something has to be real. And in fantasy, you can just create a magic system that will solve those kinds of problems.

So as I'm writing a series and I'm creating a world, there has to be a logic and a reason for the magic that I use and I want them to be different. I don't want every world to have the exact same magical system, so I have to invent something. So with the invisible college, I decided music. The magic is based on playing instruments, it's based on singing, and it's based on capturing the intelligences of animals and things and using them to empower different artifacts.

Like, if you're gonna create a printing press, maybe you'll use beetles or something. If you're gonna create a thing that makes clothes, you might use spiders, the harnessing the intelligence of spiders to do this. If you're gonna create a tram, you might use the intelligence of a horse, because that way, it doesn't get tired and it doesn't poop all over the ground. So these sorcerers have learned to trap the intelligence of creatures to be able to empower. So it's kind of like an industrial revolution that's based on magic instead of steam or electricity or things like that.

And so, that's part of the world building process that I go through as an author is I think about my main characters, I think about my setting. Is this going to feel like a nineteenth century London or a nineteenth century New England? What are the clothes they wear? What are the technology that they have?

I kind of come up with all these things, but a lot of the inspiration for this magic came from reading the same sources that Tolkien used. And I found things that he didn't use, like he used magic rings and had rings of power and things that would dominate the will to live, you know, that people would have. Well, I found other things in those legends that I'm like, "well, I'm gonna use that instead." So for me, one of the things that I found in his books that these who can't live amongst humans during warmer climates, well, they have a magic where they can take over someone's body, that they can put their spirit into their body, and the host isn't even aware of it. And so they're living their life, and so they become the spies for the Aesir to see what are the humans are doing because they're now in this warm body. They can kinda see what's going on, and they can report back to their king. Here's what the humans are doing, and here's how we can find their weaknesses. And that idea of putting that a certain person into somebody else, I got from these same sources. And they had a name for it, and I'm like, "I'm just gonna use this." I mean, this is this is something that was written hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I found it. I'm gonna incorporate this into the magic system.

Emma: Inspiration can be found anywhere. That's so cool.

Jeff: Absolutely. And finding those nuggets is one of the greatest treasures authors find that when that inspiration comes, it's like, "oh, this is gold. This is gonna be so good to pull this together."

Emma: Was it a snippet of the Invisible College that you would like to read today?

Jeff: Yes. I would. I'm gonna share the prologue. Every author has to find out, "How am I gonna introduce my characters, how am I gonna introduce my setting?" So this prologue takes place as one of the side characters who is featured throughout the books, he's part of the military that is staffing these ice trenches.

So imagine these glacier valleys up in the north, that's where the Aesir live and so the humans have drilled these kind of like trenches out of the ice. So instead of being below ground, they're inside the glaciers themselves, and so they have to staff it against it. And so I wanted to create the threat of the Aesir through the point of view of the military that are living on the front lines. And so the Aesir have not awakened yet, but we always have to have guards because when they wake up, things start going bad really quick.

So the prologue is told from the point of view of the character Joseph Crossthwait, who is basically a military assassin, and his job is to find Aesir and to kill them. He's one of the few people who are trained in order to do that. So the prologue:

The sled dogs gobbled up the chunks of meat thrown to them and several began fighting each other for the scraps. Joseph Crossthwait whispered the Aesir command and the metal skis of the sled began to warm, which would melt the ice crusts which had formed along the journey from the glacier's front.

Joseph felt comfortably warm despite the frigid temperatures As he hiked over the icy crest towards the encampment below, he gazed across the interconnected maze of trenches cut into the embankment. As he walked, he made no sound. The metal buckles and button studs of his uniform produced heat enough through the magical effect of incalescense. When he reached the command post, he lowered the silver edged cowl of his capelin, which deactivated the spell of invisibility, and frightened the two soldiers standing guard, both wearing thick beaver pelt helmets.

"Aesir's Blood!" one of them gasped in shock. "Where'd you come from?"

If he'd been an Aesir, he would have slain them both without a word with his harrosheth blade, which was fixed to the bracer on his left arm.

"Where's Colonel Wickins?" Joseph asked, ignoring the impertinent question.

The soldier chafed his gloved hands together. Both were bearded with frost clinging to the edges. It helped against frostbite.

"I'll take you, sir," said the other sentry, who escorted Joseph to one of the command yurts ringing the area.

Colonel Wickins was in his mid fifties with a balding front. An incalescent heater radiated shimmers of heat beneath a copper teapot. The yurt was comfortably warm, and the colonel's possessions were strewn about the space haphazardly. Joseph entered the tent, and the sentry remained outside.

The colonel's adjutant stood near him, a younger man half his master's age.

"Ah, good of General Colsterworth to send you," Wickins said gruffly, reaching out to shake hands. He made a hand sign of rank from the Invisible College, revealing himself to be a Knight of the Eagle, a fifteenth-degree sorcerer, a sign that Joseph responded with a higher one, which established in seconds the supremacy of his authority despite the colonel's rank in the military.

"Tell me what happened," Joseph said.

"It might be better if I showed you," Wickins answered. "We still have the body."

"You caught an Aesir? Alive?" Joseph asked incredulously.

"No, sir. He's dead. Murdered sixty before a lad with a lucky shot took him down."

"The Aesir don't consider it murder," Joseph answered with a narrowed look. "Take me there."

"I don't pretend to know the Mind of the Sovereignty on such matters," Wickins said, grabbing a beaver pelt helmet and donning it. "All I know is sixty men are dead and frozen. That's why I sent word to Bishopsgate. Come along."

Their boots crunched in the packed snow, and they started down one of the trench walls. The glacier was an interlocking maze. Joseph heard the colonel mutter the command to activate his buckles and buttons. He probably spent too much time in the yurt instead of inspecting the men and positions.

"Your uniform," Wickins said, glancing at Joseph with puzzled and wary eyes. "It's not ours."

"I just returned from spying on the Andoverian lines," Joseph said. "But none of that is your concern. Tell me what happened while we walk."

"I feel like I have fragments as is. Some men found soldiers frozen to death, their skin blue as ice. That's how we knew it was an Aesir. An entire line was like that when the alarm was raised."

"Were the officers playing music?" Joseph asked.

"Well, it was night. They were cold."

Joseph sighed with contempt. "Go on."

"We raised the alarm, started firing our rifles to raise a fog of saltpetr. Boxed them in, you see."

It was about as wise as locking yourself in a room with a wolf. In his mind, he could imagine the night, the trenches illuminated by chains of magic stanchions, illuminated by quicksilver gas, the soldiers bewildered, shooting at anything that moved.

"Then what happened?" Joseph asked.

"See for yourself," answered the colonel as they reached the death chasm. There were no guards stationed at the entrance of the kill zone. The colonel, the adjutant, and Joseph entered it and found the frozen corpses littering the way. Joseph stopped and knelt by one of them, seeing the telltale marks of blue on the vacant faces. It wasn't frostbite. It was too soon for that. The Aesir only fought during the wintertime or know the network of glaciers inside the mountain ranges. They could come and go at will quiet as the morning haze.

Joseph straightened and nodded to the colonel to lead the way. Each network of ice trenches had a command hub with a respite shelter for men to warm up in. That's where they'd dragged the Aesir's body. The incalescent heater had been shut off so the space was frigid. All their breaths could be seen.

This Aesir was seven feet tall, wearing thin bands of armor of his race. The hair was silver, the skin like snow crystals. Even the eyes were open, eyes as void and pale like diamond. The skin beneath the eyelids had the violet smears—not paint, it was part of their anatomy. A jewel wrapped in gold was embedded in the forehead. Looking from face to neck to chest, he found it. A bullet rupture. No blood, of course, but that was to be expected. The wound had already cauterized. He had a kappelin as well, the famous cloak of the Aesir like the one that Joseph wore. The kappelin was untouched by the damage, so it would be worth thousands in the open market. A bidding war in the Invisible College would be held soon.

"The man who shot him," Joseph said, examining the Aesir's body. "Who was it?"

"Lieutenant Snell," said the colonel. "Lucky shot, as I said. He was the only one who survived."

"Bring him here," Joseph ordered to the adjutant.

"Yes, my lord," replied the man, a young sorcerer himself, no doubt. Only someone from the Invisible College would have been allowed to serve such a high-ranking officer.

Once the adjutant departed, Joseph turned to Wickins.

"What do you make of it?" asked the troubled colonel in a worried tone. "You think... you think it's the Awakening?"

"We have to assume so," Joseph answered in a near whisper. "There has not been one well over a hundred years. I must reprimand you for your dereliction of duty, Colonel. You'll be demoted in degree as well. We cannot afford such lapses in security. Where's the lieutenant colonel?"

"Dead, sir. He came rushing into the fight."

"And where were you?"

The man stiffened with the rebuke. "I had to send orders. We needed reinforcements. What if there was more of them?"

"Your ignorance is appalling," Joseph said. "The last time the Aesir attacked, we were using flintlock pistols, muskets, and silver-rune bayonets. The Industry of Magic was still in its infancy. Why do you think we have so many soldiers living in trenches during the heart of winter, year after year, decade after decade, century after century?"

The colonel's eyes began to water with fear. "I'm sorry, sir. It won't happen—"

"How wealthy have you grown because of your rank, your position in the college? You think your life is worth cuppers if the Awakening is upon us? You're fat and lazy and contemptible. You would have abandoned your men and fled for your life if not for a lucky shot from a greenling who doesn't even know why we're adapting to the cold to be ready for when the real danger comes, a time like now."

Joseph Crossthwait was furious. He needed to get to Bishopsgate. If he could sprout wings, he'd fly there. But there was something he needed to happen first. He could not go back to General Colsterworth without being able to answer one question about the attack. He'd seen enough evidence of the damage one Aesir could do. What would mankind do when the Awakening happened and thousands of came from their glacial fortresses and began to wreak havoc on humanity? The people, the deaf and the whole, would be slaughtered like sheep. Some, a few, would be chosen by the Valkyria to be servants and slaves. The gifted of all ages—the poets, the musicians, the craftsmen, the scientists. Slaves. All of them.

While Wickins cowered in shame and fear, they waited for the adjutant to return with a lone survivor, a young man in his early twenties.

"Lieutenant Snell," Joseph said.

The young man had light brown hair and blue green eyes. He looked so young, it was clearly shaken by the ordeal of what he had been through that night. He rubbed his arm with a gloved hand, trying to coax more warmth from the incalescent buckles.

"Yes, sir. Who are you, sir?" Asked the young man in a troubled voice.

"I'm General Colsterworth's adjutant," Joseph replied, lying. "You were very brave during the attack."

"I did my duty, sir." He looked at the body of the Aesir with bewilderment. "What is that... thing? Is it really a man?"

"No," Joseph replied curtly. "No, they're not like us. They speak. They sing. But they have no feelings for our kind. The Aesir are our enemies. And you killed one."

"I shot him," Snell said proudly. "He didn't bleed. Why didn't he bleed?"

"Blood is too hot for them," Joseph answered. "Were you injured, Lieutenant?"

He rubbed his arm nervously. There was a gash on his jacket. Joseph had noticed it.

"He... he cut me," Snell said. "Medic has it bandaged up. Still hurts."

That's all Joseph needed to know. He drew his pistol and shot Lieutenant Snell. The crack of gunfire was loud in the hut. As the young man crumpled to the ground, Joseph turned, drew a second pistol from his belt, and shot the Aesir in the temple.

"What in the Sovereign's name!" Wickins shouted in sudden terror, gazing at Joseph with abhorrence at the unexpected violence. The delicious tang of saltpetr flavored the air as the smoke curled from the weapon and seeped into the hut.

Joseph ignored him, watching the dead lieutenant's lips part and a single puff of icy breath came from them.

"Now he's dead," Joseph said, holstering the weapon. He turned to the two shaken men. "Snell died last night. That wasn't him. It was a semblance."

Emma: Woah. That character setup—because he seems so ruthless at first, but then you're like, no. He's just... he knows things.

Jeff: He knows things that the reader just now they just are beginning to learn. Right? They're learning about who the enemy is. They're learning about this war, the kind of magic systems. How come they weren't singing when the Aesir attacks? So all these little clues are just starting to give a hint about what's coming. And then what is this? The semblance, which that's the magic I was telling about. That's what I found in the original books that Tolkien had researched. I'm like, "I've gotta use this. This is so cool."

And so I... You know, the story is about hunting down these semblances that are infiltrating society. And so that was part of the creative process. And I thought this would just be the funnest way to start the book—with high stakes and to make it as intriguing as possible.

Emma: I loved the hand signals for the Invisible College. That was super intriguing and cool. It's just so mysterious. You wanna know more.

Jeff: Yeah. I did a lot of research on the Masonic orders. I've read books on it. I kind of based the rankings in the Invisible College based on the Masonic orders. This is all public information that you can find online. And so I just like the idea of how they would recognize each other and then how you have to join this society in order to be taught magic. So you can be in the military, you can be in industry, you can do anything, and you can be a sorcerer too. It's not something that you're only that. And so the two main characters that are gonna be told about later, you know, one of them is a sorcerer of the Invisible College, and one is a girl who was stricken by an illness and became deaf as a child and wants to join the Invisible College. But because she's deaf, she can't. Because if you can't do music, if you can't do these things... but is there a way that she can find out how to overcome that obstacle? So these two characters give you a way of kind of a view of the world and those things, and they were super fun to write.

Emma: Well, I'm hooked. I already want to know more. Thank you so much for coming in today and for sharing about your books and your writing.

Jeff: Well, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Thank you for traveling with us. Next stop: your work of art. Poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, you name it! Email us at [e-mail]. Submission guidelines are not shy; they can be found in the podcast description. The Story Station, hosted by Emma, is a production of Riverbend Media Group.