You wrote both in your acknowledgments and social media that compared to Wicked Saints, Ruthless Gods pretty much murdered you. It worked very well in Ruthless Gods, but it ended up being a nightmare in book three because going from two strict points of view to three meant I turned in a 178,000-word draft which has been edited down to about the same size as Ruthless Gods, which is around 135,000. I needed to be able to look at different things and have Serefin in chapters that weren’t in his point of view, but I had split him off from literally everyone else, so I needed a new character. I kept splitting up the cast in ways that I needed other cameras. So as I was writing Ruthless Gods, I thought it was going to end up being the same structure as Wicked Saints, I wasn’t expecting all of the other point of view chapters that I ended up using. When I started writing Ruthless Gods, I knew I didn’t want to use Malachiasz yet, because he gets the third book. Wicked Saints was always Nadya and Serefin. Was that always planned or was that decision made later? I would like to keep playing in this sandbox. But because I’ve poured so much research time into it, I don’t want to start that anew with something else.Īll your books shift between your three character’s perspectives. Now I’m at a point where I’m like, I don’t actually want to leave this world for a while. It didn’t end up turning out as I was expecting or planning for, because I didn’t write this thing expecting it to get so big. The other four elements of the end were complete surprises to me. I went into Ruthless Gods knowing that I wanted to write the salt mines, and I wanted to write one element of the end. So, that’s not a duology.” Because I don’t plan, I always have scenes that I know I want to write. My agent said, “You have three main characters though. I had it planned as a duology because I had two points of view, which was to write book one and then book two would be about Serefin. DH: When you started writing Wicked Saints, did you always know that you were going to take the universe to such an expansive level?ĮD: I always build too big, so that was inevitable.

Ruthless Gods by Emily A. Duncan