Maybe There IS Hope

I was reading some blogs that I follow the other day and I stopped on Amanda Hocking's to see what's brewing.  If you will recall, Hocking is the author of Wake, a book I read and reviewed a couple weeks ago.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to give it my highest of accolades, which disappointed me almost as much as the book did.  I like Hocking a lot and wanted so badly to like this book; I have enjoyed several of her other works.

Well, as I was reading I found a piece she wrote back on September 19, 2012 in regards to the Watersong series (Wake is the first book).   She said, "So Wake is setting things up, introducing characters, revealing the danger, and asking questions. Out of the four books in the Watersong quartet, Wake is definitely the slowest. A big part of that is because I had to introduce six main characters - Gemma, Harper, Alex, Daniel, Penn, and Thea - as well as several side characters, like Lexi, Marcy, Brian, Nathalie, and Bernie. I wanted to really take my time and establish who they are and what drives them, so when their motivations and integrity are challenged in later books, it makes more sense.

In the first book, I really focus on Gemma, Harper, Alex, and Daniel. I especially wanted to establish the romance between Gemma and Alex. But in the second book, since I've really set up the principals, I get to dive more into Penn and Thea, and deepen the relationships between all the characters, and delve further into the mythology behind the series. 

With Wake, I wanted to keep the mythology as clean and simple as possible. The mythos behind Watersong is based on Greek mythology, which is so rich and epic, it's easy to want to include too much and make things more complicated and harder to understand. So for the first book, I definitely wanted to keep it on a need-to-know basis.
To read the full piece, go to:
http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/2012/09/good-news-horrible-news.html

Fans of Hocking can only hope, and pray, that the next couple of books in the series pick up the pace a bit and begin to open up this story to a little magic.