Episode #331: What I've Learned From Writing "Sister vs Sister"

Mr Crow and Mr & Mrs Blue Jay having a three birdseed martini business meeting.

Lost. Empty. Sad.

Great descriptors that are used for when something bad happens to you on a personal level. Head scratching when those same descriptors (or their synonym siblings) are used to describe you as a writer.

I know that sounds like an odd thing to say about a writer, but bare with me, and hopefully it will all make sense in the end.

I'm not sure if anyone has experienced those feelings mentioned at the top of the post, but this is entirely new and uncharted territory for me. Even when I was going through the various stages with my first novel, I never had those types of feelings about it. But with this series, I did.

I'm not completely sure as to why I'm feeling this way about my series, but I will try to make an educated guess as to why. In total, from original gestation to applying the first round of edits, I spent around sixteen years "working" on this excellent series.

But if we go back to where I decided to turn the original dreck of a novella into this outstanding fantasy series, then we've been working on this series virtually non-stop from May 30, 2022 until June 11, 2026, eight days beyond four full years.

Now I quickly became enamored of this series, so much to the point where I did not write this series like others who would write a series: piecemeal. What I mean by "piecemeal" is that they may get the first one or two written, then stretch out however remaining volumes there were to be for "x" number of months/years.

I wrote mine in one fell swoop: all five volumes actually took me almost three years to write. I won't go into great detail about how much of a challenge this was (e.g. titles, page counts, chapters, word counts) other than to say that I actually resolved those issues listed during the editing process.

Being enamored of the series gradually changed to treating the characters in my story like they were close family members. I became quite invested in their backgrounds, their present lives, even what they were going through/experiencing. It became especially hard when I had decided to kill off two of my protags.

This was a decision that I had struggled mightily with. I'll save the details for a future post, but suffice to say, almost two years after I'd written that particular arc, which naturally altered the course of the story, still affected me in a particular fashion.

As I made my way through the final three chapters, which I had to expand our to six due to excessive word count, I found myself not wanting to complete the task I assigned to myself. This was directly due to the fact that I was now having an extremely hard time of letting go.

I felt like that finishing this story meant that I had to say 'goodbye' to a group of characters that felt more like family than characters, and I wasn't ready to say goodbye. And as you read at the beginning, I fired myself to finish up and say, 'goodbye.'

If you don't believe that old axiom that characters write the story while you're along for the ride, I can truthfully dispel you of that misguided belief. My characters ultimately took over writing my story, and for that I am eternally appreciative.

Have a fantastic week and while you're at it, thank those characters of yours for making you a better writer.

{c} 2026 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved