Behind The Scenes
This Behind The Scenes explores the care and feeding of a story, King's Warrior.
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I originally wrote King's Warrior for an anthology with three other author friends, Eliza Knight, Vonda Sinclair, and Jennifer Haymore, Captured by a Celtic Warrior. It was terrific working with these ladies. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, and if you haven't checked out their stories, do!
The original kernel of a theme for the Captured anthology was, oddly enough, ‘captured.' And all the stories were going to have a jeweled dagger running through them. The same jeweled dagger. And yet, the stories were going to span hundreds of years.
Since my story was appearing first in the anthology, I wanted to set up a compelling, exciting ‘story’ for the dagger that the other authors were going to be working with. But I also had to keep the storyline relatively tight, because these were all to be novellas—no sprawling 400 pg epics here! And of course, it had to be über-sexy. All within a ‘captured’ theme.
I wrote and wrote, but kept writing around the story, until I wrote what is now the opening scene with Tadhg, the Irish hero of our story. He’s on the docks in a grubby little French seaport, trying to escape before he’s captured by the villain, and, boom, the story took off.
I really loved the challenge of this story, and when it came together, it came together fast and tight. Really fun!
But that was only half of it. Because as I wrote, the story morphed and grew (of course!) and kept getting longer. This hero had a backstory, a big one, with complicated relationships that were going to get brought back to the forefront and tested.
Clearly this was not a novella. And so not all of it could make it into the anthology version. But I knew Tadhg (pronounced /Tie-g/) deserved to have his story told. So did Maggie, his heroine.
King's Warrior is that story, in a single title release, with loads of adventure and scorching hot passion.
Travel to medieval France & England and get a taste of the Holy Lands with King Richard the Lionheart. Visit a sea town shrouded in darkness and corruption, sneak into hidden caves, sail on ships, and get snowbound in a firelit cottage with no one but a dangerous outlaw and the way he’s looking at you, firelight glinting in his eye… (yes, there is snowbound-ness!)
Have fun in there!