I read an interesting review by Magnus Liber about A Sorcerer’s Rings on Amazon. He called my writing potato chips of the genre, meaning that my writing is snack food. I can’t disagree with him. The term I use is literary candy. Same thing. My fiction is meant to be an easy, quick, enjoyable read. Literary candy.

Magnus has my writing style down pretty well. He taught me a new term that I had to look up, Marty Stu. I’d never heard of that before, but Ricky, Trak, and Pol are indeed in the mold of Marty Stu, the too-perfect hero. They don’t start out that way, but they all ended up being a Marty Stu.  I also agree that I like to throw in romance and travel.

The travel part is where I generate places where conflict can occur. Readers will note that I use three mechanisms (among others) to induce interest. A change in locale, a new character, and putting people in peril. I will continue to do so, since such things interest me and that kind of thing makes reading enjoyable. It’s part of the flavoring I put into my candy.

I may not be able to deviate much from my style, but my next series will differ from Ricky, Trak, and Pol. The protagonist is a non-magician in a world of magicians. Everyone else has magic, but my guy. That automatically puts him out of the picture for a lot of things in his world. Perhaps I will have to turn him into a Marty Stu, but I hope not.  The idea came to me months before I spotted Christopher Nuttall’s Zero Enigma series. His series has a twelve-year-old girl find she has extraordinary powers as a ‘zero,’ a person who has no magical ability. I was disappointed that he had used a version of the concept that I had already been thinking about.  Actually, Song of Sorcery was meant to follow my non-magician series, but I decided to write Song of Sorcery first and wait a bit to see how Nuttall’s series panned out before working on my original idea.

I’m happy to say, his plot line did not end up matching up to mine. My protagonist does not attend a boarding school. The era is medieval rather than the 1600’s where my latest three series are based (The Disinherited Prince is more Rennaisance, actually). Ricky started out as a pariah and that changed by Book Two in Song of Sorcery. In my new series, the protagonist is likely remain a pariah, at least on some level. He is like a blind man in the society he finds himself, but he will find some advantages due to his unique circumstances.

I’m still working on the last book in the Song of Sorcery. When that wraps up, my next project will be the first book in the non-magician series and might take a little longer to publish. I’ve got a lot of worldbuilding to do and I have a new magic system to create. The new book will still be literary candy, but hopefully a different flavor from the others.