Hello everyone,

Welcome to my stop on the “Naondel” tour. For those who don’t know, “Naondel” is the second book in “The Red Abbey Chronicle Series”. If you want to know more feel free to check out my review of the first book “Maresi”.

Here Maria shares with us how “Naondel” came about.

Enjoy!

Every book is born differently.

Naondel was born in a very different way to all my other novels. In June 2014, I wrote the following on my Swedish blog:

I’m not used to building a book this way: very slowly and thoughtfully.

I’m used to working intensively and quickly. I belong to the tribe of wordcounters, since I need something to keep me motivated and disciplined. So and so many words per day. Word is added to word, page to page, I can see the progress and the book becoming a reality.

Now I dream more than I write. I write texts by hand that I don’t even know if they’ll end up in the book. Or where in the book they belong – and before this I have always written chronologically.

The only thing I have really learned about writing is that no book is born in the same way as its predecessor. My first novel took me years and three complete rewrites. The second one was intuitive, fast and flowed well, apart from one huge sidetrack where I had to back up and rewrite. The third one was quite straightforward, but demanded some real on-location research (it was an urban fantasy). The fourth was very complicated to write with many threads to hold at the same time and tie together at the end. In Maresi I ended up not writing a word on the story for nine months, because my own expectations on the story were all wrong. And now I am suddenly writing out of order, without knowing how I will tie it all together, I fumble on looking for the right voices and it feels like I am sailing into unknown waters with a compass I cannot read and soon a storm is coming.

But storms can be refreshing.