New Name for Legends of Tirmar Book One

Just a quick note about Legends of Tirmar Book One.

I originally published the first Legends of Tirmar book under the name The Andor in 2017. However, due to an unnamed—but hugely famous—franchise choosing to name their new television series Andor, I felt I should rename my book, and the associated characters, to avoid reader confusion. So I have renamed Book One as Two Without Fate. The story, however, is the same.

More or less.

But before I talk about the updates to the story, a bit about the new name. “Two Without Fate” comes from an Old Norse poem, Völuspá. That particular part of the poem talks about how Odin, Hoenir, and Lodurr come across two trees, Ask and Embla, and create the first man and woman from them. The trees are described as “Two Without Fate.”

Now, Two Without Fate isn’t about the Viking Adam and Eve. In the context of the poem, Ask and Embla were without fate in the sense that their futures were unknown. The Legends of Tirmar revolves mostly around two characters whose lives have been turned upside down and their futures are uncertain. Over the course of the series, they have to decide whether to run away from threat and save themselves, or to rise up and become the heroes the world needs.

I’ve been asked who the two without fate are in the story. One is obviously Flyn, but to avoid spoilers, I will leave it to the reader to discover who the second is.

But back to the changes. While updating the manuscript, I decided that if I’m going to re-release the book, I should do more than just slap a new name on the cover and do a quick search and replace to change Andor to Aendar and call it a day. I decided to take the opportunity to clean up some things that bugged me in the original.

You see, while writing the prequel novella The Militiaman of Garthset, I realized I had made a big mistake in this story. I’m going to explain that to you, along with some other things I felt needed to be fixed. So if you haven’t read the book yet, be aware that the information below contains some minor spoilers, so best to skip the rest of this until after you’ve read the book.

Still with me?

Okay, let’s get into it.

In writing the original story, I felt Gudbrant needed some serious motivation. In fact, in my original notes, Brenna was Gudbrant’s wife, not just his fiance. I quickly realized that if she was his wife, Gudbrant would not have been around when Flyn showed up. He would have been out looking for her. So I decided being his fiance would at least make it plausible that he hadn’t rushed off to save her as soon as her horse showed up without her.

Well… Maybe not. I mean, what’s the difference between wife and fiance, practically speaking?

Another issue was the age difference: Gudbrant is almost old enough to be her father. I took that problem, crumpled it up, and threw it away. After all, we’re not talking about Western society here. Even in our society, it’s not that unusual for a man to marry a woman fourteen years younger than him. But it was always there poking at me.

Then came The Militiaman of Garthset. If you haven’t read it yet, I won’t give away any spoilers. Just know that it’s a story about Randell, who grows up with Brenna. They’re best friends. In a small town like Garthset, that generally leads to more than just friends. So does that mean that Randell is jealous because Brenna is going to marry his boss? That just got too distracting for the story. More importantly, I realized that Brenna and Gudbrant hooking up just didn’t make sense. She grew up seeing him like an uncle. For her to marry him is just a tad creepy. Maybe more than a tad.

So that’s the biggest change in the rewrite. Brenna is not Gudbrant’s fiance. There are a lot of little changes, but that’s the only major plot shift. At least so far. I’m still in the process of editing the story.

But outside of that, there are a lot of goodies for people who read the original, so if you already own The Andor, you’ll get something new out of the new version. A lot of somethings. For one thing, this version is over fifty pages longer. Every scene has at least some minor changes—mostly mistakes that were missed in editing, though a lot of general clean-up. In some cases, I’ve expanded on scenes that I felt fell short. In other cases—like the opening scene—I completely rewrote the scene from scratch. Then there are entirely new scenes. These aren’t just deleted scenes I added back in to make a “director’s cut.” These are completely new scenes designed to improve the flow of the story.

So while the new version is longer, I think it’s faster-paced and an overall more interesting story. I hope you all enjoy it.

Two Without Fate should be available soon.