It is book launch day for S.Kaeth’s Between Starfalls. If you did not check out the cover reveal for this book on my site last month, you totally should. Between Starfalls takes you on a journey about small choices having big impacts, the fight for what we love and the bond between mother and son. Since its launch day, I have S Kaeth over with me to talk about her book and her inspiration.
This is Creator’s Roulette and just like creatives, stories and the journey behind them have much to teach us. Let’s dive right in.
S.K., Between Starfalls is the first book of the Children of Nexus series. How many books are going to be in the series? Do you have them all charted out?
There will be five books in the series, and I have each of them already written. The second and third have been rewritten, actually, and I’m working on edits for the second book.
You have done book launches before and those are momentous in an author’s published life. What does Between Starfalls’ book launch entail? Is it something you have been preparing for a while?
I mostly followed what I did with Windward, setting up my cover reveal with the help of several people–including you!–and talking about it on Twitter. I set up pre-orders, but those aren’t as effective to help launches as they have been in the past, due to some rule changes Amazon has made. I learned this after I set it up, though, but it’s all good!
I also contacted a few book bloggers and sent out ARCs, and am trying not to devolve into a quivering mass of nerves hoping they’ll like my book! I updated Windward with a link to Between Starfalls in the back of the book, so if people enjoy it and want to keep reading, they have a way to easily do that. And finally, I’ll be getting some author copies, signing them, and selling those personally. I’m thinking of doing bookmarks based on my amazing cover for swag, maybe personalizing them with either Rinaryn script or Kamalti script.
That sounds fantastic! I am excited to see what you create. 🙂
Which civilization / age would you say Between Starfalls is inspired by?
The main characters are Rinaryns, which are a Stone Age agrarian society, but there’s a point-of-view character from an underground, near-industrial civilization–the Kamalti. Neither culture is based on any real life culture, though I’ve found my beta readers have drawn interesting parallels to their own experiences regardless of where or how they grew up.
You are a mom with three kids. How has your time as a mom inspired this book? Are there aspects of motherhood that you bring to it?
I started seriously working on this story about five years ago, though it’s bounced around in my head in various forms for far longer. At the time, I hadn’t read any stories where the hero was a mom, and the omission was glaring to me. So why not? What lengths would a mother go to in order to save her child, and what might the fallout from those actions be? It was interesting tapping into that side of me through Kaemada’s trials trying to save her son.
How do you map out a series? I have seen story maps, world maps, what tools do you use?
I’m terrible at plotting! I wrote Between Starfalls like three different times trying to figure out how the story would work, and once I had a workable story, I drew a map so my directions and such would be consistent. I had the world (for the island, at least) already figured out, since this has been ruminating in various forms for over fifteen years in my head. Then, after I finished Between Starfalls, I continued telling myself the story.
I had a version of the second book and the third written before I went back and worked on really polishing up the first. I jotted down the questions I had posed in each book along with the answers to come, and noted the character arcs I wanted to aim for in each book. Once that was done, I re-wrote Books Two and Three, and then wrote Books Four and Five, finishing the saga in December of last year.
What made you choose to write fantasy?
I grew up immersed in science fiction and fantasy. I hadn’t read much fantasy set in a culture with stone age technology levels (I’ve still only read a handful of examples) and so I wanted to explore that. Surely there are fantastic stories to explore in that setting! And from there, the story just sort of… unfolded.
When you were on Creator’s Roulette last time, telling us about being an indie author, you told us a bit about your other book, Windward. How is this different from Windward?
While I use the same magic system and the setting is the same island, Between Starfalls has a bigger scope than Windward. Palon’s concerned about her dragon nest chiefly, while Between Starfalls is concerned with the clash between two very different cultures, mired in their own histories and the stories they tell themselves. The pace is more leisurely and there are four main points of view rather than just one, but I still push my characters to the breaking point and use their strengths against them.
Want to read Between Starfalls? It is now available on:
Amazon
Goodreads
Indie Story Geek
You can connect with SKaeth on Twitter or her website.
Photo of pages by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
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