Ask the author...

[Mildred Echesa]

What inspired the title of the book and it's otwe series

[jemimapaul]

How many years did it take for you to complete Totem and all the 3 books in the whole series?

[Hussein21]

How many years does it take to finish the series?

[Charlie Sheldon]

Do you have any relations in India and why did you decide to base on India

This whole series is based in the Pacific Northwest of North America, and set there, not in India. I do not have relations in India.

[Charlie Sheldon]

How many years did it take for you to complete Totem and all the 3 books in the whole series?

I started thinking about a book set in the Olympic Peninsula and dealing with the ancient legends in 1990s. I started doing actual research in 2010. I had the first drafts of the first two books and the first half of Totem written by 2015. Strong Heart came out in 2017, Adrift in 2018, and Totem in 2021 (though it was basically finished in 2019 just as covid struck). So I would say it took me 11 years.

[Amelia-Lily]

I absolutely loved reading this book. I know it has a sequel already, may I ask how many books you're planning to write for the series?

[Charlie Sheldon]

I absolutely loved reading this book. I know it has a sequel already, may I ask how many books you're planning to write for the series?

Glad you liked it. Actually the story Totem finishes this series, it is a trilogy of stand alone but linked tales telling one grand story. I wanted to "finish" it because I didn't want to get trapped in a series, or leading readers on and on with no certainty I would ever "finish." That's the worst thing, to leave someone stranded. Having said that, though, I have been working on another series, or set of tales, which start sort of right after Totem ends but then go out into the future 100 years, this series starting with when Sarah goes back into the Marking Place and there is an earthquake and she is trapped and has another vision, or dream, and returns with something, these events taking place around a story built around a crime, and a detective or policeman working for the Sol Duc tribal police who stumbles onto something major, and then another story out around the year 2060 or so when other life is found in the watery moons of Saturn, showing that extra-earth life does exist, and the Webb telescope has found habitable exoplanets around the nearest star, with an earth-like oxygen atmosphere, and a probe has been sent to further examine that planet, a 20 year journey across 4.3 light years, this in a time when great families and oligarchs rule the earth and nations and unexplainably it starts getting much colder in the northern hemisphere because the Gulf Stream has stopped, maybe the start of a new ice age, and panic is rising; and then a third time of say 2105 when Sarah's great great granddaughter is 14 herself and her great great grandmother tells her a story and shows her what she has taken from the Marking Place and the great great granddaughter sneaks into the Park and somehow wriggles into the Marking Place and has herself a dream, or vision, this at the time when an ice age has begun, the world is starving, and the data from the distant probe suggests humans can life on that exoplanet and some rich families decide to send a ship, with people, for a New Start, and among these people will be Sarah's great great granddaughter and others who make a great journey and reach the planet and then have a great and terrifying adventure......something like that, anyway.....all somehow linked to the Marking Place and what Sarah found, showing where people really came from.......a new series. Or a continuation....

[jemimapaul]

How many years did it take for you to complete Totem and all the 3 books in the whole series?

I started thinking about a book set in the Olympic Peninsula and dealing with the ancient legends in 1990s. I started doing actual research in 2010. I had the first drafts of the first two books and the first half of Totem written by 2015. Strong Heart came out in 2017, Adrift in 2018, and Totem in 2021 (though it was basically finished in 2019 just as covid struck). So I would say it took me 11 years.

Wow! That's a lot of hard work and perseverance.

[Nyavaloesther]

If you were to rewrite the story, what part you would change completely and why?

[Charlie Sheldon]

If you were to rewrite the story, what part you would change completely and why?

I would not rewrite it.

[Leasa Ana Maria]

Did it take you a long period to find the information needed and put together the ideas and thoughts to create the book?

[Charlie Sheldon]

Did it take you a long period to find the information needed and put together the ideas and thoughts to create the book?

answered in earlier questions

[jemimapaul]

Did you face any obstacles as an author while writing Totem and the series?

[jemimapaul]

Congrats on winning the "Other Fiction 2021 Book of the Year"! What was your reaction when you found out that you had won this award?

[Tamara Abdellatif]

Do you imagine the characters in real life?
And their reactions to normal day to day stuff?
Or are they not in your mind till you mean to write about them?

The first couple of novels I wrote, I struggled to "see" or "bring characters to life" and until one or two became "real" to me writing was an effort, an exercise in faith, but eventually, once a couple characters emerged and took on a life of their own, then the story became much easier because the characters began to do things and I was just describing what happened. This latest series, the last three books, the last 11 years, began with nearly three years of research, hours andn hours of study about human origins, development, consciousness, genetics, myth, legend, ice ages, geology, plants, climate changes. I knew eventually I wanted to write something set in Olympic National Park about a kid finding his or her strength somehow, but other than that spent no time on characters, at all. Then when I started writing Strong Heart, which began in 2013 when I got back from my first long gig at sea and decided if I was serious about bundling all this research into something, I better take a writing course, which I did, an University of Washington, a night time course for adults, once a week, taught by Lynn Coffin, a poet and novelist who should be much more famous than she is. The very first night, first class, before we even said our names, she had us write for ten minutes, and the piece I wrote is almost word for word the first three pages of the first book in the series Strong Heart. The characters were just there, waiting to be described, that's the best way to describe it. Of course I would ponder them and consider, and see their backstories, but I think basically all that research and filling my brain with information created a stew within which the characters became real. And that's the way it's been ever since, for each character, they just sort of "appear", I mean I will decide, let's say for Totem, I thought, I need a character who is somehow tied to the political state, government, politics, because a mining enterprise in a national park is surely political, and thus emerged Wentworth Randall.
I mentioned this earlier in response to another qiuestion, but the other thing I came to understand back with the start of this series is that each main character, to be interesting to the reader, needs to have his or her own dilemma or challenge, separate from the general story line, some personal crisis of issue that they are wrestling with, and this is especially true for a story structure like I use which has several points of view and plot lines all generally following a linear time line (ie no flashbacks except for the trips in dreams of visions the characters take, or in the case of Henry David Olsen's journal from his dream-time years ago). I think I just start telling the story, you see each character as you would in real life, a stranger just before you, and with time you grow to know him or her, you don't see pages and pages of backstory and description before the action begins, and I think this works more realistically, and is better for the flow of the story, though some readers seem to prefer a structure that leads off with a long long long introduction, and those readers do not like my tales very much. My sense here is that a reader has no use for a character who is merely in the story to move the story along, or tell the events without any personal engagement, readers see through that right away and you lose them. Instead the hope is that to the reader each character's arc is important and this will be what keeps them engaged - so for example I have Jarred who is an overweight doughy teenage boy who screws up at the beginning and makes a big mistake with his knife and vows not to do that again, and is afraid he is secretly weak, and doesn't think much of himself compared to his lean athletic friend Conner. This is designed in hopes the reader becomes engaged with the arc of each point of view telling the story, so while they are following the overall story they are enjoying the character's own personal struggle, whatever it may be, and if successful then the reader is engaged not with one main character telling a tale but with a whole group of people living within an entire world.....

Thank you for the thorough answer!
And rest assured all your efforts are not lost on the readers, we can definitely tell while reading when the book is well researched and the characters are well written to relate\empathize with.