Embers story aesthetic
As Embers gets closer to publication, it’s been kind of funny to look back and remember how concerned I was about trying to continue the series after Ronan released. I’ll admit a little bit of it was leeriness about ruining a nice, tidy trilogy by adding more books (which is one of the reasons Fracture and Embers have been marketed as more of a sequel duology). But my major concern was that Ronan was this huge, sweeping finale with all of these high stakes that surely couldn’t be topped. I was all worried that I’d plateaued and any continuation would fall completely flat by comparison, so in that sense, I’m glad Fracture ended up having such a positive reception.
DO Fracture and Embers have as high of stakes as Ronan did? Honestly, their scope is so much different, making it impossible to truly compare them. Fracture was a fairly contained story, much more like Dakiti and Nexus in that regard. Embers definitely feels bigger, still not quite on the same expansive, galactic scale as Ronan but definitely farther-reaching than Fracture.
It’s hard to pick a favorite. Ronan will always be special just because of the sense of achievement it brought. It was a 153,000-word monster that gave meaning to seemingly unrelated details from its two predecessors and effected huge strides in character development. But if Embers hasn’t overtaken it as my all-time favorite, then it’s a close second, which has honestly been a welcome surprise. I wasn’t expecting it to be bad by any means, but I guess I’d subconsciously convinced myself nothing would top Ronan.
I feel like this book has become the beating heart of this series. There’s the sweeping, overarching conflict the characters have to deal with, but the most important conflict in the story is on an individual and interpersonal level. And I don’t know—that was all just a lot of fun to write. So much of what we see in this book has been such a long time coming. Pushing the characters to their absolute limits and then seeing how they bounce back and redeem themselves has been really rewarding (though they probably hate me for it).
In that sense, I can’t get over how perfect the dictionary definitions of each of the Legacy books’ title words are. I’d forgotten that when I first decided to write these two books, the first one was actually called Embers and the second one was so far untitled. Then one day, one of the daily writing prompts on Twitter had a theme of “broken/brokenness.” This quote popped into my head out of nowhere:
Something clicked in my mind and it was at that moment I decided the first installment would be called Fracture (you may also recognize that quote as eventually being used in chapter 33 of the book) and then Embers would become the title of the second one. I was much more pleased with this arrangement because it created such a sense of structure. Fracture is where everything gets broken, and Embers is the aftermath that deals with recovery and redemption…though not without its own struggles.
I can’t wait to share this story with you.
