The Chronicles of Evyntyde

When I decided to write novels set in the world where the Kingdom of Evyntyde existed, I had no greater difficulty than deciding what to call the series. I really hated to use "chronicles", "saga", or any other well-worn terms, as this very fact rankled me. So when I thought about other series titles, I found myself in a bad place indeed. Nothing worked. My thesaurus was worn thin. I returned to the tried and true, and realised that "chronicles" was in fact the best fit.  So I called it The Chronicles of Evyntyde. There you go.

One reason why "chronicles" wasn’t too bad was because it did not imply a finite series, nor did it drill down to some macro-plot line that implied that it was a continuing series – which it isn’t. If there was any principle or concept that I developed right from the start, it was that I was not going to write a novel that left a reader hanging out for instalment two, and so forth. I wanted to write novels that were self contained, but where characters could make appearances again, or where events in earlier novels may get referred to or potentially influence the ‘here and now’. Not entirely original, but certainly not common. I liked that. Still do.

A slightly misleading dimension to the series title is that a story doesn’t strictly have to take place in Evyntyde, nor have anything related to it. But I rationalise this by suggesting, in a tenuous sort or way, that whatever story gets told, was collected by scholars in Evyntyde. At least that’s the story I will stick to, although there really isn’t a sense of that going on, particularly when the majority of my narrative is in third person past tense.

The world is large, rich and interesting, and it would be a shame not to exploit this in the series. That is one of the reasons why I wrote The Sceptre and the Orb first – a good third of the story takes place in the Kingdom of Waymoor, and five hundred and fifty years prior to the "usual" time line of the series. But that is another story…

Here is a high level map of the world: