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Writer's pictureSara Tunder

Happy 2 Years! Update and The Acros Raiders Backstory

Today marks the two year anniversary of The Acros Raiders: From the Ashes being out in the wild for everyone to see! In that time, I've released a second edition, sold 208 copies, won an award, and met so many amazing people in the industry! It's been so much more amazing than I expected.


I'd certainly love to be a best selling author paying the bills from my work, but I'm working hard towards it. Sales have not been my focus, getting books 2 and 3 done have been top priority! (Business-wise! Life does not agree!) I want to share the story of how I got into writing this beast of a project, but first I want to get into an update regarding life and book 2.


The day after my last update, life took an unexpected turn. Max's dad went into the hospital and passed away and things have been rough since then. I had to cancel the appointment with the editor because I couldn't get to beta reader comments in time (and still haven't). Hurricane Helene flooded our town shortly after things started to settle down and then Hurrican Milton just happened and we had some seepage in the bedroom due to record rainfall. We've hardly had a break. There was one beautiful day between Helene and Milton where the temperature was perfect and clouds dotted the sky and Max and I went to

Bok Tower Gardens with Kat (his dad's girlfriend and First Mate). Below the singing tower in front of the koi fish mote, he finally, after almost ten years together, proposed! So there is some light among all of this chaos. But now I'm preoccupied with wedding planning. I'm still riding off the excitement so once I get some of these details together, I'll be able to get back into editing book 2. Beta reader comments can be very rough to get through if you're sensitive like me. But also dealing with grief, stress from the storms, and the time it takes to do repairs and debris cleanup, I don't think I'm in the right headspace to process constructive citicism. So right now I think I will focus on wedding stuff for a week. Book 2 progress will pick up again soon. I do have a map artist I'm commissioning for book 2, so things aren't at a complete stop! The art process is in progress.


Oh boy, looks like this will be a bit of a long one. To celebrate 2 years of The Acros Raiders: From the Ashes being out in the world, I want to get into the history of this trilogy. I think this part might be helpful for young authors out there because this story starts in middle school when I was around 13.


It started when I was paired with Kaitlin, a girl who looks exactly like me, in english class. We were supposed to make sentences with vocabulary words and Kaitlin painted a really beautiful picture with the word "ashen" and I was struck from there. I was already interested in writing and had stories in my head, but this is what made me need to get it on paper.


I had a story with, believe it or not, Warrior Cat ocs... Spottedtalon, the medicine cat of MossClan was the main character. What was the story? I have no idea. She soon became Spotty (readers of The Acros Raiders might see where this is going). And she had a friend, who I can't tell you the name of, but that name didn't stick and he soon became Aster. I threw these characters away for human characters, Mike and Sandra. They were the main characters in an urban fantasy story where there was an underground society of fantastical creatures. Sandra's grandpa was connected to it somehow. I genuinely don't remember what happened but it became a werewolf story. (My new last name is soon to be Wolfe, maybe I should revisit it and publish under my married name). (I'm not going to do that.)


Sandra's name changed to Sitara and I introduced Abril and Julio (took Spanish class, can you tell?). Withorn appeared from the last name of someone who was on the detention list in Study Hall. He had a brother, Vaux. Temperance was added as a joke based off a friend's oc and I went a little bonkers with her.


Somewhere along the line, I merged the cat story with the werewolf story. I played way too much Skyrim and the underground fantasy society became its own world, Harkive. It started with the town of North Ash, which came to me in a dream. Sitara and Spotty combined and Sitara was no longer a werewolf but a cat shifter. There was a cool scene with her jumping off a train to save Mike. Aster showed up as a real dude guy (I call him AC in my notes which stands for Aster Cat because he started as a stupid dumb red cat I'm sorry). Abril became Cosette, Julio became Jean. Jean was supposed to be comic relief and he hated this stupid Aster guy (listened to the song This Love, This Hate by Hollywood Undead and their entire relationship spawned from it). Hated the way Jean Valjean was pronounced because my friend was in French class so Jean is pronounced Gene out of spite.


Ren was really interesting. Called Wren at first. Realized I had too many male characters so for a few years, Wren was a lady. Wren did NOT like being a female and before I even knew what being trans was, he kept insisting he was a boy. I don't know. Characters do what they want. It wasn't something I thought about at whatever age that was (13? 14?). Dropped the W because I watched Attack on Titan. Let him just be a dude and he became... whatever this angry bastard man is today. The anger solidifed in him when I turned him into a girl. He was so angry that whole time.


Somewhere along the line I hated the name Sitara because it's too similar to mine and I just randomly decided to rename the main charcter to Scotty. I thought a male name for a girl would be neat and I still agree.


Oh yeah the plot, there was always a plot back then. Okay, this is also going to take some explaining. I'm getting quite tired. It's like 11pm and I spent all day cleaning debris so I'm going to manifest 2014 DeviantArt Sara and I'm so so sorry. No I'm not.


So have you seen the map of Valko? Spoiler alert: It's MICHIGAN. Imagine the Ohio meme but Michigan.

As a born and raised Ohioan, I'm supposed to have a blood fued with Michigan but I think it's REALLY cool. I live in Florida now and my neighbors are from Michigan.

Okay, Michigan is kinda irrelevant because the original war was fighting over coal as a resource because I grew up on an abandoned coal mine and just found it around all the time. Dug for it sometimes. Yearned for the mines as a child, I suppose. Coal isn't interesting and it was political at the time with Obama's war on coal so I made a cool fake science power source, ethner. I gave everyone guns. Made guns with the ethner! Decided to actually world build around it! Added gods because again!!! I played too much Skyrim!!! Decided to pull the war away from being over resources (it still kinda is on Ghent's side...) and it just eventually landed on being about religion.


Well, I'm tapped out. Might edit this tomorrow to be more coherent. If I don't, well I hope you enjoyed whatever this was.

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