The more I write the more I realize that coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part. What’s hard is figuring out which ideas have legs and can become stories or books. Sometimes it takes some hard work to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

When Heroes of the Empire came out in June  it brought to a close a long period of focusing on one world and one project. Since 2018, at least, when I started the first draft of Gods of the Empire, I’d basically lived in the world of the Unari Empire, building it out and telling the stories of my characters in it. The only reason I felt able to work on the sequel to Moore Hollow in the spaces between those books was that it meant returning to a world I already knew.

At the same time, I was gathering ideas like some thieving magpie, putting them away in various Word documents for a later date. I knew from the time I collected them that some had more substance than others, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how long it would take me to figure out which ones were which.

See, the thing with trilogies, at least for me, is that they are an implicit promise to the reader – I know how this ends and I’m going to finish it in good time. If I say “here’s my new book, it’s the first part of a trilogy,” rest assured that, barring some unforeseen circumstance, I’m working on those books for the next few years.

Which means, back in June, I got really excited about the idea of diving into a new world. Part of what makes writing fantasy so fun is you get to let your imagination wander and come up with strange new places, things, and people. Writing a trilogy means that you have to put that wandering on hold and I was happy to get my walking shoes back on (so to speak).

And I had a target – I wanted to start my next book during National Novel Writing Month. I’ve done that for several of my books. NaNoWriMo provides a great way to focus on writing for a month, even if what you’re left with on December 1 is only two-thirds or even one-half of a finished manuscript. That would give me a couple of months to build the world, flesh out the characters, and then figure out what was going to happen to them.

Easy, right? If only.

I actually had to go through my idea files pretty brutally, with virtual red pen and everything, and just get rid of stuff that didn’t really strike my fancy. Some of those were mere ideas (“surely there’s a fantasy story in the Scapa Flow incident, right? What about High Noon but with wizards!”) that were never going to become a real story. Others were things that I’d hung on to so long without developing that I figured their time had passed. Ultimately, they were ideas that I just didn’t see sprouting stories and I hadn’t faced up to that fact yet.

In the end I had about three dozen ideas that could become my next project, so I decided to so what my anal retentive self always does – start dividing and conquering them. I put each idea into one of four groups – Sci-Fi, Older Fantasy, Newer Fantasy, and Non-SF/Fantasy (yes, I’ve got a couple of those). The goal was to produce a “winner” in each group and then compare those four to each other. I almost worked – I wound up with five finalists because I couldn’t decide between the top to Newer Fantasy ideas.

I worked through each idea. I took a week and spent one day thinking through all the angles I could for every one. I did a PowerPoint presentation for my wife to get her feedback on the ideas. Good ideas that I at first thought were front runners fell by the wayside either because they weren’t as deep as I’d hoped or they just weren’t singing to me.

Finally, last week, I was in Richmond for court and had some time the night before to work through the final three (don’t worry, my colleague was doing the argument the next morning). I walked around my hotel room, talking to myself, arguing the pros of a particular idea then playing devil’s advocate and tearing it apart. After a couple of hours, and a really enormous calzone, I finally made a decision.

My next project has the working title The Fall. It’s inspired by the sad tale of Franz Reichelt, a Parisian tailor who met an infamous fate:

To use an awful pun, that’s the jumping off point for this project. It’ll be set in a similar kind of world, timeline wise, but include what I think is a really nifty magical element. This is my first time building a magic system for one of my novels, so I’m both anxious and excited about the prospect. Structurally I’m leaning toward doing something like Citizen Kane, where the main character is investigating someone’s life and we see it play out in flashbacks.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to diving into this.

And, yes, it is the one my wife liked best.