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Charlie Sheldon wrote: ↑02 Feb 2022, 10:10 The story Myra tells Sarah at the very start of Totem is taken from the first book in the series, Strong Heart, which takes place the summer before Totem begins. What does this story reveal about the series?

Charlie Sheldon wrote: ↑03 Feb 2022, 22:39 I wrote the books to be stand alone tales, and have had enough readers start with, say Adrift or Totem, and then they go back to read the first two, usually. Of course, it is best to read the books in order to fully experience how the characters and events start and grow, and how the books are linked, separate but telling one grand story. When I started writing the first one, Strong Heart, in 2013, I had no idea or sense this might be a series. None. A series, at least to me, is both good and terrible - good because you can play with many characters and complex story lines, but terrible because you are then trapped in the series, and must decide how to finish, how many books to write. When I started writing Strong Heart I used the story frame Conrad uses in Heart of Darkness - he had a group of men meet at a pilot boat and then while waiting for the tide to turn to go out to the ship one of the people, I think it was Marlowe, told the story of Kurtz and the Heart of Darkness. I love that sort of frame, stories in stories, so in my initial draft I had a lifeboat crashing ashore up on Haida Gwaii off British Columbia and the trapped sailors, in winter, marooned, unable to cross the mountains to the one known settlement far away until the weather broke,. forced to hunker down in shelter. The mate asks one of the characters, William, who is a sailor from the ship the lifeboat came from, and who was born on Haida Gwaii years before before being sent away to a government school to become like a white man, then running away to the states, to tell the others a story to keep them sane. That was my frame, but when I finished the book the tale seemed too long and so I simplified it, removed the frame and just told the story William told as a tale itself, Strong Heart. But I had all these chapters about this lifeboat and sailors and storms and after finishing Strong Heart thought, well, what about this lifeboat? Where did it come from? What happened to the ship? What happened to the other sailors? So that was when the series began, as I built those chapters into Adrift, which became the second story, happening about four or five months after the first. The third tale, Totem, is really two books in one, and I debated long about how long to make the series, and in the end decided I wanted a trilogy, something long, one grand tale, but not endless, and hope the readers will agree. In the end of course, all that is important is that the reader, in the best case, fall into the book, be there, in it, whatever order the tales are read.