Ideas for books can come from anywhere. Annabelle came from a figurine made of starched doilies. Soul Bearer came from a dream and a character floating around in my head.
But Allmother Rising sprang from the same strange well that A Heart of Salt & Silver came from.
Anxiety and an inability to fall asleep.
Basically, there’s this thing I do when I can’t sleep. I close my eyes and just picture a random character, sometimes two. Then, I just let the scene fill in around them.
It gives my mind something to focus on, drawing my attention away from the million things my anxiety is grasping at and holding my focus in one place.
That helps me relax, which helps me sleep.
If I like them or their scene, I come back to them the next night.
If I like the character but not the scene, I let them live in my brain for a while until I find a world for them.
That’s what happened with Aurisye from Soul Bearer. I liked her but the world I’d pictured wasn’t right. So I kept her until I found a world for her.
Aurisye was an outsider, so filling in the world around her took a little longer.
But Veliana of Allmother Rising is so much a part of her world that the scene that filled in around her was perfect. She is connected to all of it. The history of her world, her goddess, the animals, the trees all around… She’s connected to every last bit.
And when Tyrvahn waltzed into that scene, he fit too, connected in a different way.
After only a couple nights of thinking about their scene, I started writing. I had to tweak that initial scene, of course, once I learned about Veliana’s broken heart and Tyrvahn’s recent losses. The way they saw each other shifted, and I had to reflect that.
But the bare bones of how they met were born in anxiety and sleepless nights. And once I wrote that scene, the rest of the story followed quickly on its heels.
Now, I did have to go back a bit first. There were scenes I had to add to explain why they were both in an abandoned temple in the middle of the forest.
But only a few chapters.
So chapter (THREE OR FOUR, CHECK!) Is what started the book.
As I wrote their journey to save their Realm, we found Garle and Kivala somewhere along the way. They made the whole picture complete, filling in gaps I didn’t even realize were there until we found them.
All together, they made the book complete.
I’ll be going live on release day (Tuesday May 25th) at 3pm Eastern for a reading of the scene that inspired the whole book and for a Q&A session.
Don’t forget to order your copy while the ebook is on sale! It’ll be 99 cents until June 1st.
Hardbacks are also available, and paperbacks will be soon.
You can find it on Amazon here and add it on Goodreads here.
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