The story of Their Runaway Mate…
It all started one foggy night when I was driving home along a quiet country road. I couldn’t see any of the houses or yard lights that I knew were out there. The fog was just too thick.
And… my mind wandered. In retrospect, daydreaming probably wasn’t the best use of my time at that moment, but you know… it all worked out, so it’s okay, right?
Anyway, in the beginning, I’d envisioned four sisters running in the four cardinal directions, trying to escape their fate of being sacrificed to beasts because of magical abilities that each of them possessed. It was a blessing / curse of their birth.
By the time a couple of days had passed, I had a whole series written in my head: what each of these sister’s magic was; how they each met their heroes; and, yes, one of the stories, the first one actually, was going to have the heroine running through the fog and coming upon a house where the hero lived. It was in a magical place, where there was a rip in the veil between the worlds, and he was its guard.
As I write all this out now, I think… huh… I could still write that series… *anything is possible*
But by the time I sat down to actually write the story out, I had just finished my series A Werewolf’s Curse. That series has one close-knit plot that is shared over five different stories and everything happens concurrently over one night. The stories aren’t long (a novelette / novella length) but weaving them all together and keeping track of what everyone is doing over all of the various story lines was more than I wanted to take on again so soon. Because, you see, in my head, the four sisters’ stories would once again be happening concurrently and there would have to be some overlap with the climax and overall story arc.
So I mulled the idea over again and decided that I still liked the idea of my heroine running away from a fate that someone else had chosen for her.
And from there… the rest came.
I try to keep my stories more entertainment and less serious (I read and write to escape the real world), but the Mannix Dragon Shifters series was also highly influenced by things that were happening in the real life world (segregating people based on prejudices, fearing the unknown, drug addictions, mental health, etc.). And there were times when I worried that it was too much, but I couldn’t see a way that this world existed without having some of these every day things bleed over into it a little bit. Still, I tried to keep it more focused on the romance and less focused on the challenges.
Anyway, that’s the story behind the story. 🙂
What do you think?
Would you like to know about the story behind the story for my other books?
If you haven’t read it yet, Their Runaway Mate is available at:
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