Early cover art concept

Shortly after starting The One Saga, I contacted a literary agent who gave me some advice on getting accepted – once I had completed the novel. One of the things which was recommended was to keep the novel between 140 and 180 thousand words. This one piece of advice stuck in my mind to such an extent that whenever I was writing I was overly conscious of the final size of the novel. So I would jump years in the story, to prevent it from becoming too large. In the end, it finished up at 155 thousand words, but to my mind whole chunks of information and events had been left out to accommodate the size restriction.

So I thought I’ll shorten the novel, but in doing so, I will write in all of the missing stories that I wanted to include from the start I then released a version, The End of Mor, which had a lot of errors in it and was  duly slated by a number of people for that reason. So I decided to withdraw the book and look for an editor.

As a result I finally have the story as I want it. Young Warlock is much shorter, only 100 thousand words, but is all the more readable for it. Many people it seems balk at reading large tomes only to find that they lose thread somewhere around the middle and never finish it. This too I have learned to my cost. Also, writing long works means any sequel is going to be a long time coming. So it is with this thinking that I have decided to break my saga into smaller pieces and offer them at a lower price.

Very soon I will update the site with text from the new release, though you will still be able to buy the original from all of the current outlets as it will provide some overview to the first three books at least. The next of which will be, Fire and Thorn.

Mathew Bridle
13th May 2013