Author Guest Post: Why I Chose to Write a Standalone Fantasy
When I started working on The Cloaked Saviour, I already knew the world would be larger than one book. I had ideas for other places, people and conflicts. There were scraps of history that might never appear in this particular story. Some were useful. Others were just things I enjoyed inventing.
The tempting thing would have been to treat this first novel as the beginning of a series. After all, fantasy readers are familiar with books that promise a much larger journey. I enjoy those books myself.
But I wanted someone to be able to pick up my debut without making a commitment to two more books.
That decision changed how I wrote it.
A standalone has to make room for the world while still giving its central conflict a proper ending. You can hint at an old dispute, a distant town or a political institution without explaining every part of it. In fact, sometimes it is better not to. People in the real world rarely stop to explain their entire history to someone who has just walked into the room.
The greater challenge was knowing which questions the novel actually owed the reader an answer to.
The Cloaked Saviour takes place in a society where inequality is protected by law. A masked outsider begins to challenge that order. People start hoping he will be able to change things for them, and that creates a problem of its own. I was interested in what ordinary people do when their champion cannot make every decision on their behalf.
That is a conflict that needs a conclusion within this book. It would have felt unfair to spend an entire novel raising it and then tell readers to buy the next one to find out what happens.
At the same time, the larger world does not disappear when the final chapter ends. A political decision can matter somewhere else. A rumour can travel farther than the person it is about. Someone who barely figures in one story may have a life that deserves another.
I like that possibility. It lets me build a world through separate experiences instead of requiring every reader to follow one continuous plot.
There are practical advantages too. My first novel is roughly 63,000 words. It’s easier to recommend a complete story of that length to someone curious about an unknown author than to ask them to begin a sprawling trilogy. Particularly when you’re publishing independently, trust matters. I want a reader to feel that a single paperback gives them something whole.
I still love big fantasy series. I may write one eventually. For now, the plan for Continuing Press is simple: one complete story, a much bigger world.
And if someone finishes the first book and never reads another of mine, I want that to be fine.
In Hearthollow, Lord Draeven does not need to rule by chaos. His books are neat, his orders lawful and his scales only slightly wrong. That is enough to keep a valley hungry, indebted and afraid.
Cricket has spent seventeen years learning to notice what everyone else has learned not to see. The masked Wanderer has spent even longer acting before anyone can stop them. When their paths cross over stolen grain, each recognises something useful in the other.
But a rebellion built around one impossible figure carries its own danger. The more Hearthollow believes someone will always come to save it, the more carefully it learns to wait.
As Draeven tightens the arithmetic and the cost of resistance rises, Cricket and the Wanderer must build something harder than a legend: a way for ordinary people to act, argue, remember and hold power to account, even when no hero arrives.
About the Author
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Website: https://continuingpress.com
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