Hello everyone! Surprise (or not so surprise if you have been reading Rise of the Lunar Champion) Christmas Eve-Eve post to announce that Sun’s Guard: Queen, the fourth book in the Sun’s Guard series in the Arcana Realms Universe, is officially available for purchase up on Amazon. Here’s the link, and then I’m going to babble for a little bit about the writing process for this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQTS9N9R

So when I looked at my little blurb for this book to start plotting, I realized structurally it was very different from the other three. There wasn’t a lot of lead up to the final villain, so the supporting plot really had to stand on its own. I also knew that while I had a very, very clear image of the climax, it wasn’t going to be enough to help me do long sessions of writing. I decided to try to write a set amount everyday–250 words was my magic number.

Now, I wasn’t STRICT about this. If I had something happening that I knew was going to give me no writing time, I didn’t push myself to work on it. If every word was a struggle and I only got to 100, okay then. Try for 250 next time. (So it didn’t move and start stacking and create a mountain.) The point was just to keep steady work happening because the big drive wasn’t going to be there like it was with prior books, where I could see certain scenes in my head and I desperately wanted to get to them.

That isn’t to say that I don’t love the book or the scenes that happened. I do. I think it is a solid part of the series, and it’s a good read. It just wasn’t a visible thing in my head this time. Sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn’t, at least in my experience of the plotting process. Reading it is of course very different, and I can now see it playing out and have favorite scenes. (The scene in the kitchen with shipwreck, I felt so deeply, lol.)

Character-wise, this book has a lot of growth that happens, both on screen and off. Things are very rapidly changing for the set up for the final three books. We also get to meet a character who has been mentioned many times but hasn’t made a physical appearance yet who I hope fans are excited to meet. (Caley also gets a Christmas surprise, which is fun.) I also feel like Caley’s dilemmas in this book are things real teenagers face rather than being magic in any nature. Since Knight was more of that then practical, I really felt like I was calling back to Ten and Page which had direct issues like moving in with a new family or dealing with a bad relative.

Queen is also the first book that I really feel like you can’t just jump in. There’s so many references to events of the first three books, it’s just hard to imagine it not being confusing to me. But that’s as the writer, and your mileage can vary. I was careful with the first three, but this time I lost it, so I imagine going forward, it is going to stay about the same as Queen. Not too bad to make it halfway, though, right?

The cover art is really great. I didn’t have as firm of ideas for this one, and Ginny really found something that worked to make it dynamic rather than odd. I really like the new look of the covers, it just took someone with a more visual/art eye to translate my idea into something that is workable. Not one of my strong suits, I’ll admit it. I don’t do well in decorating in video games either, I try too hard not to crowd things and so it looks too sparse, lol.

Hopefully everyone enjoys the fourth book in Caley’s series and the new covers. I, for one, am glad the craziness of the last year is over and I get a couple months peace before I start Sun’s Guard: King, which is tentatively set to release in January of 2025. (Maybe I’ll release it on my birthday? LOL)