Reflections on Completing a Trilogy
Three books and eleven years later
I wrote the Calenor Trilogy on and off for eleven years. That is a significant portion of my life as I approach my thirtieth birthday, and now that all three are out in the world, I am looking back on the experience of writing these books over the last decade.
I feel that the lessons I learned about writing deserve a post of their own, especially as I am diving into a new story and applying those lessons (hopefully). Today, I’m reflecting on the life that I have lived while writing and rewriting the three books of the Calenor Trilogy.
First drafts are hard, y’all.
When I remember writing the first draft of what became Black & Gold, I remember how warm those summer nights were that I spent writing with the window open, my bedside lamp bathing my childhood bedroom in golden light. I remember binging seasons 1-3 of Game of Thrones and then watching the fourth season as it premiered. I also remember that was the summer I started to realize I had a crush on this cute boy in my friend group named Matt.
When Kaysi and I set about editing Black & Gold, I was twenty six. Matt and I had gotten married the year before, we had spent the summer cleaning up our fixer upper backyard and rebuilding a deck, and I had just had my first miscarriage. Editing became a refuge. I couldn’t fix the pain I felt from losing that first baby, and I couldn’t force my body to be ready to get pregnant again, but I could make a scene better. I could fix a plot hole. I could find joy in that world, in those characters.
By February 2022, we were nearly finished with Black & Gold when I found out I was pregnant a second time. We finalized everything with the formatting later that spring and set the release date for July. But before that day came, I lost the second baby.
Growing up, I knew two things would be true for me. First, that I would publish a book. Second, that I wanted and would have a family.
So it is hard for me to look at the year 2022 and see it clearly. It was the year I lost my second baby, marked the due date of the first baby I lost, and really confronted the idea that the road to motherhood was not guaranteed, and much of it was outside of my control. And it was the year I published my first book. It cannot be categorized as a bad year anymore than it can be categorized as a good year. It is both, and the existence of those two realities definitely colored the way I experienced Black & Gold releasing.
I will say, the first time I held a copy of Black & Gold in my hands that summer was one of the most surreal, out of body moments of my life. I fully teared up, because I couldn’t believe I had done it, especially with everything that had happened that year. I wanted to reach back through time to my nineteen-year-old self and tell her that we did it!
Second books are the messy middle
The second book in the trilogy is Throne & Fire, and the first draft was written the one summer I didn’t come home from college. Moscow, Idaho is a true college town, the university surrounded by the farms that make their living on the lush Palouse. In the summer, with most of the students gone, it becomes a sleepy small town.
The job I got didn’t start until July, and it was only in the evenings, so I spent most of my day at home in my first apartment. An apartment that had no AC, because most of them sat empty during the summer months, and Moscow supposedly did not get hot. Well. That June, it cracked 100 degrees for a week straight. I remember sitting at my desk, binging West Wing and sweating as I wrote. It was, let’s say, less fun than the summer I wrote Black & Gold.
I started editing T&F the summer B&G released, with the hopes of finishing it in time to publish the following summer. Unfortunately, the second book was in much rougher shape than the first, and editing took much longer. Summer turned to fall, and fall ebbed into winter. The winter that began in 2022 and went into 2023 was, for me, a very dark time. Metaphorically, as I navigated two chemical pregnancies and the anxiety around whether or not I’d ever be able to stay pregnant, and literally, as the winter lingered into early April, the skies dark and heavy with clouds. In that sense, working on the book was a source of light but it required more work from me than I’d ever had to do before, which was its own challenge.
Then, right as spring finally arrived with blooms of flowers and clear blue skies, I got pregnant again. And this time, I stayed pregnant. The first trimester nausea and fatigue laid me out pretty good, and progress slowed on the book. Ultimately, of course, I didn’t care. The second trimester brought relief from the nausea and some of the fatigue. Working on the book started to be fun. Throne & Fire released in November 2023.
Closing a chapter
The first draft of Sky & Steel was written the last summer I lived at home, before my senior year of college. I did not appreciate how lovely it was to live at home, not fully realizing it would be the last time (except for a handful of school breaks). I had coffee with my mom most mornings out on the deck. I’d write the book in the evenings, with the faint sound of my brother’s chosen playlist coming through the wall between our rooms. What I realize now, looking back, is that Sky & Steel was always going to be the closing of a chapter. The first draft truly closed my time in my childhood, even though at the time I was twenty one.
I did start editing Sky & Steel in the fall of 2023, and made it maybe two thirds of the way through before the twins were born. To say that their birth changed my entire life is a massive understatement but alas, that too is a topic for another time
In those very early days, we slept in shifts. I was up with the twins from 1:00 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. In those dark hours when the rest of the world slept, I finished editing the last book. If you’ve read it, these were the climactic final chapters, the ones I had first envisioned almost ten years previously when I first sat down to write Black & Gold.
My editor went on maternity leave in the summer of 2024 and because she is a far more experienced mom than I (plus she only had one baby), we powered through the final edits over the summer and into the fall. Formatting and cover issues delayed the release but in March 2025, Sky & Steel released into the world, completing the trilogy.
When the end isn’t really the end
The Calenor Trilogy is complete, and I have no inkling that there are any more stories to be told in that world. I spent a decade with those characters, creating that world, and my most prominent feeling is gratitude for this thread that wove its way through a tumultuous decade in my life.
I have moved onto a new project, a new book in a new world. The themes and ideas I want to explore now, as I near my thirtieth birthday, are very different from those that drew me in at nineteen. My hope is that this next decade, my writing will take place against a backdrop that, while not without challenges, is more conducive to focusing on thriving, rather than surviving. It is probably a vain hope, as life is rarely so gentle, but it is hope nonetheless.
But even if it what comes next is not as easy as I wish, I find that I am filled with the desire to really push myself to write more, to write differently, to write better. And maybe, just maybe, the next book might find its way out into the world, just like Black & Gold.