What is The Eternal Night Saga? (Part 1)

I’m going to spend a few blogs explaining my next big project. It’ll take a bit of time because I’m picking up a project I started long, long ago, before I was 30, before I was married, even before I started college.

And that project is The Adventures of Strin and Fred.

It was my first love as a writer, the first long work I really enjoyed writing, the first story I wrote more than 100,000 words on. On the surface, it’s a simple enough plot — Strin, a local hero, and his apprentice, Fred, defend their village from a horde of mindless, ravenous monsters. That summary doesn’t take into account the dozens of characters running around, doing their own thing. It doesn’t take into account the various themes and giant monologues. It doesn’t take into account how freakin’ awesome of a character Fred is to write. Etc.

The Adventures of Strin and Fred is a story in four books. Two and a half have been written. Two have been published, the first back in 2004. That one is out of print.

After writing and publishing the first two books, I pushed the project to the back burner. I don’t remember all the reasons. Mainly, I had a lot of other half-finished projects I wanted to tackle. I’ve gotten those out of the way. I’m finally at a point where I don’t only think I should finish the work, I think I want to.

And so I’ve begun to make my way back into the heads of Strin and Fred and Webi and Celina and the Empress and all those other half-fantastical, half-philosophical characters.

Perhaps you’ve notice that the title of this post doesn’t connect to its content. The problem with calling the series The Adventures of Strin and Fred is that it’s bigger than the two of them. It’s like calling the original Star Wars trilogy, The Quest of Luke Skywalker. It’s just not quite accurate, even if it is mostly true. I started calling the series The Adventures of Strin and Fred back when I had no idea what was going to happen. (More on that in another post).

So, my current working title is The Eternal Night saga. It may change. I’ll probably still refer to it as Strin and Fred.

Anyway, I’ve done my flash fiction bit on this website. I serialized A Girl Called Snort on my previous iteration of this website. Now it’s time to return to the beginning.

(Post #2 coming soon – How It All Began. Followed by Post #3 – What Now?)