The Goddess Saga was the first series I wrote set in the Chronicles of Azaria universe, published in 2014. It’s still listed on Goodreads and there are even second hand copies of books 2 and 3 around.

But why isn’t it available anymore?

Let’s start from the beginning…

In 2011, I had been working on my first ever novel for over six years. It was an adventure fantasy set in a post-industrial future, but I was stuck. I’d been revising the same chapters over and over and making almost no progression.

I thought joining a critique group might help and I stumbled on a website called Authonomy, run by Harper Collins. Here I made some writer friends, one of whom was a romance writer. She could see how fed up I was getting of my stagnation so suggested I write something completely different to rekindle the spark of writing. It was hard to break from what I’d been working on for so long but it turned out to be a good thing.

That new project became The Goddess’s Binding (initially titled The Binding). Nowadays this would be considered a romantasy book, as the crux of the plot was about a curse that forced people to fall in love. It was a bit of a cheeky ‘deconstruction’ of the instalove trope and had the usual sassy heroine and obligatory love triangle, amongst other things.

The problem?

I’m not a romance reader, meaning I failed to understand what was appealing about the genre. In my effort to make a ‘romance that non romance readers would love’ I alienated myself from my target audience. On top of that, the diversity and representation was pretty weak (even as an author of colour) and the story just wasn’t something I’d been passionate to tell, and boy did it show! It took 7 years to finish the third book in the trilogy and I recently did a re-read for fun, it has not aged well all.

So despite having three books out, in 2021 I made the decision to remove the books from publication. They just weren’t reflective of the stories I wanted to tell and weren’t a good representation of my abilities as a writer. Goodreads never removes books so that’s why they are still there, but the books are gone, in fact erased from the Azaria timeline as I’ve set out to rebuild the series.

I wouldn’t say I regret writing these as I learned a lot from the process, but they are no longer part of the Chronicles of Azaria series and are not canon to the timeline anymore. If you do happen to come across them, feel free to read, but now they have no relation to the actual Chronicles I’m currently writing.