This book took years to write.
Not because I was slow. I am a disciplined writer. I sit down every night, I do the work, I move the manuscript forward. But King Andovar and the Little Empress needed time that was not about the number of words on the page. It needed time to grow, to clarify, to become what it needed to be.
I want to tell you a little about that journey — not as a behind-the-scenes feature, but because I think the way a book develops says something important about the relationship between a writer and their work.
Where the Story Began
Every book I write begins with a feeling, not a premise.
The feeling that began this book was something like: what does it mean to protect someone you love when the world they inhabit is not built to protect them?
That question has personal weight for me. It has weight for anyone who has raised children, or been a child, or loved someone whose vulnerability was real and whose safety was not guaranteed. It is, in that sense, a universal question dressed in specific circumstances.
The kingdom, the little empress, the relationship at the center of the story — all of it grew from that question. Not the other way around.
I did not build a world and then wonder what should happen in it. I found a feeling and then built the world that could hold it.
The Technical Challenge of the Trilogy Structure
King Andovar and the Little Empress is the first book in an ambitious trilogy. Writing the first volume of a multi-part story presents a particular structural challenge: the book must work on its own while also doing the slow, careful work of laying foundations for what comes next.
This requires restraint. Every instinct a novelist has is toward resolution — toward the satisfying arc, the earned conclusion, the sense that the journey meant something. In a trilogy opener, you have to provide enough resolution to justify the reader’s investment while withholding enough to earn their continued presence.
Getting that balance right took multiple drafts.
What I Hope Readers Take From It
I write literary fiction because I believe stories can do something that essays and arguments cannot. They can put a reader inside an experience so fully that the reader feels it rather than simply understands it.
What I hope readers feel when they finish King Andovar and the Little Empress is the particular weight of responsibility — the way it sits in the chest, the way it changes how you see the world and the people in it.
That is the emotional core of the book. Everything else — the kingdom, the politics, the relationship between Andovar and the little empress — is in service of that feeling.
On the Trilogy Ahead
The next two books are underway.
I will not say more than that — not because I am secretive, but because I have learned that talking about work in progress too much can drain it of something it needs to become. The story needs to live in the dark a little longer before it comes into the light.
What I can say is that the questions King Andovar raises are answered in the books that follow. Not easily. Not simply. But fully.
I hope you will be there when they arrive.
— Elan Wasabara
