The Young Sorceress was the most difficult of the Senta and the Steel Dragon books to write.  Part of that was the time that I was writing it, and part of that was the subject and time period for the characters.  Book 2 fits in the story line just about a year before book 3, so the characters aren’t that different.  However, the events in book 3 have huge implications for the characters and in book 5, they have been festering for five years.  Writing a story in between there, it was particularly difficult to peg the characters’ lives and emotions.  For that reason I focused much more on Senta than in any other book (that may sound odd, since she’s the title character, but if you’ve read the other books, you know that there is a lot going on). I was writing it when I was really working hard to finish my Masters Degree.  For that reason, I chose to divide up the chapters into chunks.  Something I had only done in book 0 up to that point.  If I had to do it again, I might have changed that, but it worked well with what was going on in Senta’s life at that time.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be talking about The Young Sorceress and the characters in it.  While it is one of the shorter books– about the same length as The Dark and Forbidding Land, it features many characters in important parts.  Maybe more than any other book in the series.  It also has my favorite cover of the series.