Shaded Secrets Artbook

Shaded Secrets Q&A Part One!

Hello everybody! In lieu of art, since I am away from home, I'll be hosting an Ask The Author Event for Shaded Secrets that'll run until Sunday :] 

Here are the rules:

-Nothing inappropriate, please. 

-If you have a question after reading this, ask it in the comments! If you want your question to be in the next chapter, PM me your question.

-Feel free to ask about characters, character designs, the plot, or anything, basically. 

Here are the day 1 questions, from those who got in early: 

Question From Candie: Does Hailwatcher like anyone/will he be in a relationship? 

He doesn't have much romantic attraction toward anybody, so probably not [sorry for you HailAsh shippers, lol] He has what I'd consider to be a ship tease in Ashpaw, but by the time he realized she was into him she'd gotten over her crush so they're just close friends now.

Question From Candie: How did you come up with the idea for the series?

Something I always wondered about the Warriors series was what exactly the medicine cats do. Sometimes they're portrayed as the religious leaders of their Clans, and sometimes they're the anxious kid shoved into the position because no one wanted to give them a chance. What are they expected to do when a leader rises to power- perhaps someone who shouldn't be one? Are they willingly complicit, manipulated into believing that it's for an abstract greater good? Or is there something a bit more sinister lurking underneath the surface? And that's how the idea of Silent Shadows came about. Fun fact- the current version you all read is actually a revision- the original Silent Shadows, written about a year ago, was only 25,000 words, 13 chapters, and much less technically sound. Nowadays, my writing is much better and there's more of a B-plot so the book is significantly longer. 

Question from Candie and Blossom: Did you write the plot beforehand or just go with the flow? [paraphrased] 

As stated above, Silent Shadows is a revision [Sneaking Suspicions is not, and neither is book 3 which is being planned] so it was just a matter of breaking the story down to its most basic and then expanding on things from there. There are a great number of intricacies woven throughout the book, some of which I came up with on the fly, but for the most part the book was written according to the plot skeleton I made beforehand. 

Question from Blossom: Have you ever dealt with writer's block while writing the Shaded Secrets Series?

Yes!  Big time. For Silent Shadows it was around Chapter Twelve where things started to drag for me, so I took a few days to do other things and jumped back into it. I write ahead of posting, which helped a lot [for example Chapter Eight of Sneaking Suspicions is out now and I'm working on Chap. Twelve] I finished Chap. Fourteen, Fifteen, Ashpaw's chapter, and Sixteen in about four days, and did Chapter Seventeen over the weekend. It's hard for me to get burned out, thankfully, but when I do I bounce back fast. 

Sneaking Suspicions has been a lot harder since I don't have an older manuscript to go off, which is why I finish chapters at a slow rate. I'm still doing decent, and it's probably be done by the end of the year because I write about twelve chapters a month and the action is starting to pick up now so I won't be as begrudged to slog through establishing characters and stuff. 

And that's all the questions I received today! If any of you have more, feel free to ask in the comments as stated above :]

You guys will be getting an artbook update Sunday, hopefully, so stay tuned!