D'VAIRE

Chieftain Lorcan of the Acwellan’s eyes flew open and a smile spread across his face. It was not a pleasant sight. It was a decidedly wicked flash of white teeth and although he had once been considered a handsome elf, over a thousand years of hatred and malice had twisted his features into a perpetual sneer. ~ from Vengeance from the Dark Elves. I love them. If I am playing a game where I can choose my race, they are always the ones I select first. When I started worldbuilding for D’Vaire they immediately made their presence known. I didn’t want one kind but many with varying colors of skin, hair, and eyes. Each tribe approaches the world differently and just like humans there are good ones and bad. In Sentinel’s Dagger you meet the first one Edion. But he wasn’t the initial elf in my mind. It was Chieftain Lorcan of the Acwellan who stepped forward with a scowl and a bad attitude. We all have those moments in life when we get kicked around or have to deal with monstrously difficul...

In my last blog, I talked about how D’Vaire was created. The first book was Dra’Kaedan and Brogan and I can’t wait for you to see their tale retold but let’s talk about what happened after the original story was completed. When I started the novel, I didn’t have an outline or anything. I wrote it by the seat of my pants and not even I knew how it would end. D’Vaire was supposed to be designed so that each one was a standalone title but when I was done there were so many things I didn’t have room to include. They would have to wait for the second which turned out to be Sentinel’s Dagger. Gavrael was the beginning of the sentinels. In fact, when I first started crafting his tale there was no Lich Sentinel. It was Gavrael (with Gedeon at his side) who was going to approach the Council to change the way the sentinels functioned within it. But I got sidetracked before his story could be completed by Chander and so things changed. (We’ll get to all that in a future post!) The thing you le...

As I look ahead to the release of Dra’Kaedan’s Coven, my thoughts are drawn back to how it all started. There have always been characters in my head, but it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I understood they were stories that needed to be told. I have created many and for years I worked on a series of books that I still have yet to write. There are notebooks of plot outlines and timelines but nothing more than a collection of a few chapters. They are all contemporary stories and they started as M/F. My first gay character started as a secondary one, but I kept getting drawn back to him. Once I started reading M/M his story wouldn’t go away. Suddenly, it wasn’t just his story in my head but there were other couples as well. Since I have always been a gamer, its difficult for me to escape fantasy and some of these new people wanted powers. It was time to create a new series. At the start, I was going to do a mixed series. One book M/F and the next M/M. They were going to be mostly s...

Technically, Book 1 is a re-release which begs the question: why does it have a different title? This project came to my mind in stages. At first all I planned to do was clean up the book and send it over to my editors. The problem with was I could barely bring myself to open the document. As I’ve said before, I was proud of the book when it was first published but I’ve learned a lot since then. I knew it was a mess and by the time I got to Book 11 I knew there was only one choice and that was to rewrite it. At that point I didn’t have a new plot yet or have a clue where to begin but I started thinking about aesthetics. There was a two-year gap between when I published Book 1 and Book 2. In the beginning, I didn’t think about continuity between the covers. I have no clue why it simply didn’t occur to me to make anything cohesive from book to book. But my cover artist created Book 2 and then carried the same fonts throughout the rest of the series. There was no question that Book 1 nee...