This is how I like to think of the characters now-looking out over a vast landscape, a beloved friend at their side, contemplating new adventures. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll take a day to stop, to reminisce, to flip through the pages, sink into the world, and remember I wrote that. I say I am happy with how it turned out, how I ended things, but I am already in the midst of the next book, thinking hard about how to make it better. How can I know it is real until I am not the only one experiencing it?

Before that, it’s a home with the furniture laid out, but no visitors or occupants except me. It often feels to me like books don’t really exist until someone else has read them, has met the characters I’ve sketched out on the page, has lived in the world I’ve painstakingly built. In a crumbling empire, an emperor relies on bone shard magic that requires each citizen to give up a piece of their bones to fuel the horrifying constructs that run the empire. There are always gaps for readers to fill, things to interpret, different things that different people like or dislike. The Bone Shard Daughter is an endlessly fascinating story filled with characters and relationships that readers will instantly fall in love with. Stories are a collaboration between authors and readers. And that means the trilogy isn’t really over. Already it’s started to feel hazy and indistinct, a thing slipping into the background.įor readers, however, the final part of the journey is just beginning. It’s a frozen frame in a life that has kept hurtling forward. For me, this trilogy is already in the past. At the same time I’m cultivating the new seeds of other stories, I’m halfway through drafting another, and seeing yet another hit bookstores. Writing and publishing is a pipeline, and we do not move through it on a linear path.

I’ve said before that as writers, we always seem to be living simultaneously in the past and in the future.

Andrea stewart the bone shard daughter