Shine Cycle

The Shine Cycle is my magnum opus (emphasis on “big”), a planned series of mythopoeic fantasy novels. It is a story that primarily spans two continents of an invented world (though at times stretching to other worlds and even other universes) from their beginning for over two hundred years. And running through it, and occasionally surfacing in the stories I feel called to tell, are the threads of the individual stories of dozens of characters from our world who abruptly find themselves there, and make their mark on the their new world. Most of the actual text—that is, the fiction itself—is posted only in private documents shared with individual readers helping me revise, but much of the background material and some stories will be posted here. A background essay is posted on this blog most Mondays.

Because of the scope of the project, for now I’ve been trying to put more effort into the structure and background of the series than into writing any one part of it. I really don’t want to have a character in two places at once (according to the accounts in two different books) or an event to be described by two books as happening entirely differently, and so I’m trying to work my way through the entire series in outline first, and get to the details of each story later. (Though I am working on actually writing, and revising, a few of the individual stories.) And I’m trying to develop a general outline of each major character’s history, so that I never end up needing a character to be where she wouldn’t be. I want everything to make sense, preferably the first time I write it.

In June, 2011, because I hadn’t given a proper introduction when I began this blog, I reintroduced the Shine Cycle (and then, in later posts, the rest of my work).

For reference, you can read the outline of the planned series, including a high-level summary and précis of individual planned volumes of the saga.

I’ve posted many background essays over the past few years. Those having to do with the culture, government, settings, races, etc. and with technology, “applied metaphysics”, and so on are listed on their own page.

I posted a political map of the two continents on which most of the story is set.

I’ve also posted profiles of several important characters (each profile consisting of the character’s one-paragraph “entry,” a description of the character, and an outline of the character’s history in the Shine Cycle universe). They now live on their own Page.

Some of the series will take place in our own world’s future history, which I’m projecting to use in those works.

And I’ve posted some of my prose here:

• My longest completed work that I think is presentable, the short story “A Murder, A Mystery, and A Marriage”: parts one, two, three, four, five, and six.
• Another short story, “A Backwater Rebellion”: parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, …
• A short story, “Ithaca,” which I’ve also adopted as the first chapter of my novel Sunshine Civil War.