Warning: Looooong blog post ahead.

via Wikimedia Commons

The Staff & the Blade is the next novel in the Irin Chronicles. As I’ve mentioned other places, this story will be Damien and Sari’s. As I’ve also mentioned, it’s giving me headaches. WHY is it giving me headaches, you may ask?

Well.

It is a universally acknowledged truth (at least by me) that when you’re writing a fantasy series, the first book is slow-going. Any time you have to build a fictional world, you’re going to have to plan. Some of that planning will happen before you ever start writing, but a lot of that planning will happen as you write because you often don’t know something is going to be an issue until it comes up in the manuscript.

So you stop and start on the first book, as you write and research and make stuff up (cause that’s…