The Giant Singer: The Sibylline Saga: Book Two, page 29
anna@annacackler.com and put CONTENT ADVISORY in the subject line.
Mild gore and violence, arson and fire, control of another person's body via coercion (supernatural mental ability), pregnancy (no common pregnancy tropes are included, the pregnancy is not a plot line), kidnapping, isolation. There is a love scene on the page, but it is not explicit.
Acknowledgments
I am so grateful to everyone who has helped me make The Sibylline Saga a reality. I could not have done this without the network of support from both family and from new friends I’ve made along the way.
Many thanks to those of you who helped me name the Athorum: Gerry Robinson, Jim Meeks, Ashlyn Van Benschoten, Sallie Montuori, and Bear C. It was so fun to brainstorm with you all the ways this mythical cure-all came to be.
I’d also like to thank my many early readers, who helped me polish the series: Zhade, Elizabeth Plass, Brittney Willbanks, Enos Evans, Pam Cemen, and Carla Evans. I couldn’t have done it without your feedback and encouragement.
And thank you so much to Lyndsey Smith at the Editing Forge for her tireless work in giving this series its final polish.
There are three other people who have supported me through the ups and downs of being an author. It began with my mother, who told me stories every night and shared her love of books with me. Thanks, Mom, both for the excellent start and your ongoing support and encouragement.
Thank you Chelsea for listening to me ramble and vent with infinite patience. You say you envy my confidence, but that’s all fake. You kept me sane when I was barely keeping it together.
And thank you to Kevin, my very best friend and the best husband anyone could ask for. I can’t express how much your support and your faith in me has meant.
This series has been an absolute labor of love that began when I was just a teenager. I am so incredibly proud of it and of myself for getting this far. And I’m can’t wait to see what comes next, because this is only the beginning.
From the Author
This story started on a hairpin curve in Puerto Rico.
Neither thing is terribly remarkable. Puerto Rico is entirely made up of hairpin curves and I lived there at the time. I was on my way home from the grocery store, going around a very specific curve on Carretera 108, and a song came on my car radio: Waking Up the Giants by Grizfolk.
It was like I’d been struck by lightening. The idea of seeking an object that was just behind the storm, and a warning to be careful waking up a bigger man, a better man. I’d heard the song a hundred times before, but something about that specific hearing…I had to write this story.
I went home, left the groceries in the car, went straight up to my room, and wrote a three paragraph summary of two wanderers on an epic quest to find a mysterious Clarion and wake up the legendary Giants.
Within a month, those three paragraphs had become a short story: Waking Up the Giants.
At the time, I had already finished writing book one of this series, and I had just sent it off to its first round of beta readers. I had a vague idea of turning it into a series, but honestly I had no idea of where to take the story next.
Waking Up the Giants was just supposed to be a reader magnet. A story in the same subgenre that I could give away to newsletter subscribers.
I didn’t know at the time that this short story would change EVERYTHING. Absolutely everything.
It happened when Eoghan was standing on a cliff, looking down over Lujor and thinking about the cause of the war. It was basically just some background info and setting description. I needed a small detail—the name of the ocean he could see on the horizon.
Usually I’d just mash my hand against the keyboard, then add vowels and remove consonants as needed to make the resulting world pronounceable.
But there was already a word in my head. A place name that I’d used once before to name another ocean: Arigua. I was kind of sad that I’d used such a great name already in The Forest Witch as a throwaway detail. It got mentioned maybe twice in the whole book and the reader never saw it in person.
And then I thought…what if this is that same ocean? What if Eoghan and Nora are on the other side of the world from Gwen, living their lives, playing out their own epic adventures, and knowing nothing at all about the most powerful sybil that ever lived?
So I put some Athorum in Eoghan’s pocket and set my two adventurers loose in a world that suddenly got much, much bigger.
That’s how I create worlds: one piece at a time. I feel my way through it. Every time I meet a new character, I follow them a little deeper into the story. Every fork in the path gets taken. Every loose thread gets pulled.
Fletcher was just an obstacle on their way to the mountain’s peak. He didn’t even have a name.
Isla was just a mugger.
Darius was a ride to New Haven.
It wasn’t until after I wrote their introductory chapters that they became important. And it wasn’t until part four that I became obsessed with Isla—but that’s a discussion for after book three…
Anna Cackler, The Giant Singer: The Sibylline Saga: Book Two
