I’m still working on my next book and allowing myself to take some time to fully develop it. In my previous books, I had good settings, but I’m starting to see ways that I could make them even better. In this next book, I’m trying to take a little more time to fully develop my setting and the magic system. While doing that, I’m working to better understand some of my characters.
Part of the work to understand my characters comes from my experiences in my day job. I work with all types of people, and the better I understand where they come from, the easier it is to anticipate how they might react. It’s similar to my approach with my characters of this latest book. My backup documents containing my idea and outline grows as I have taken pauses to write details about my characters. Sometimes, I learn things about myself as I treat those details as an interview with the characters.
In many ways, people are influenced by their settings. The way they think, speak, act, or interact with others are all affected. That’s where they start from. From there, it is up to the characters to decide how they will react. Understanding where the characters come from is fun and hopefully, will make my stories better.
Check out my books on Amazon.
My last book, Collected Lives, takes place near the end of the twenty-second century, with vacations and tourism to Earth by off-worlders controlled by major corporations. The largest corporation, Collected Lives, has several enemies. The story follows the events as four people from different portions of Collected Lives’ process are thrown into the middle of a larger problem.
My fantasy, A Map, a Mage, and a Sacrifice, is set in a world with limited technology, but where sacrifice is a necessary element to magical power. The greater the pain and suffering, the greater the magical power generated. The few mages in power use voluntary sacrifice of the citizens to generate power they use to protect and defend the empire. But their rule may be coming to a close.
Malignance, my third book in my time travel series that began with Resonance and Dissonance, is on Amazon as a kindle and a paperback. That was a fun series to write, and for now, it is completed. I have also placed all three books from that series into one volume titled The Machina of Time.
If you’re looking for a science fiction story, try my book The Promise of Dust, which takes place in a cloud city floating in the atmosphere of Venus. Or Progenitor’s Legacy: Deceit, which takes place many years in the future on a tidally locked world that orbits a red dwarf and has been reached by humanity in their search for the alien progenitors who seeded the galaxy with nano machines.
If a young adult science fiction is more to your liking, check out my series This New Earth, that starts with Demons of a Dead World and Secrets of a Dead World.
If you are looking for a young adult fantasy, check out my book The Threads Unbound.
DANIEL R. BURKHARD 