Welcome to the author commentary for DSA Season One! This has been a long time in the making, and I am so excited to share tidbits on the writing process. DSA was such a challenging project from start to sort-of finish (there are still more seasons to put together).
What is an author commentary?
I’ve always loved reading and watching behind the scenes info about a creative project, be it a film, show, book, or comic. To see how something came to be, from the original inception to the end product is truly a marvelous process. Each one is so unique, yet the challenges are pretty universal.
With my author commentary, it gives me a chance to share the process with you. Almost like a post-mortem for myself, this is where you’ll see all the areas I botched the writing, the pacing, the plot points, and everything else imaginable during the creation of the DSA.
Spoilers ahead…
Will there be spoilers? Absolutely. I am going to talk about the book in detail. Why characters are the way they are, why events happened the way they did, etc. What I will not be spoiling is where the story goes next. That’s off the table.
So for The Clearing, I will be going in depth on the climax of the novel, but I will not delve into where The Witness goes from there or any other plot point to be revealed in a later book. (And boy are those answers coming soon!)
Hints are allowed.
DSA Season One
There are six books in the first season of DSA. I’ll be going through all six over the course of the year.
As a primer, I thought I would share the original design of the series as it is one of those areas that changed wildly as time went on.
I developed the series back in 2014. Originally, it was meant to be released in weekly installments either by newsletter or through a service like Patreon. Each book was written in twelve parts with two or three sub-chapters making up each part. There were also bonus back-up stories to offer readers interested in more information on the characters or the series.
I don’t recall the exact reasoning for abandoning this approach. It may have been due to the fun I’d had working on Greystone’s First Cycle or simply because I thought novels would work better as a selling point, but I switched directions on the series.
Each book was rewritten, top to bottom. The twelve sections were gone. Scenes were rearranged. Some were cut. Some were expanded upon (most were expanded upon). The backup stories were folded into the novels themselves. There was one in Promethean that ended up being a crucial scene in the book, so hooray to me for figuring out how not to screw that up…
Instead of treating them as these digital-only entities, every book in the DSA series became fully fledged novellas/episodes in the series.
What’s ahead?
The Clearing is up first. This book…well, let’s just say it went through A LOT of changes over the course of its development and I can’t wait to share them with you.
