Storyline inspiration / sneak peek into current book

I’ve been asked several times, “Where do you get the ideas for a story?”

I am sure for different authors, this answer might vary, but for me — I find myself oftentimes waking up with an interesting premise or problem statement. From this conclusion, I work my way backwards toward the kernel of capturing the interesting events that make that conclusion a reality.
For instance, some of you will start reading some of my books and realize that I am very fond of writing series style stories. Stories that might seemingly start off simple but as the reader travels through the story, they realize that not everything is ever as simple as things seem. There is always a backstory, there is always a motivation for things to be the way they are.
With my current book, PRINCESS INTERRUPTED, I won’t give away too much by saying that it is actually a prequel to the current Prophecies series. My desire was to focus on some special attributes about one of the characters which appeared in the first book and was shown to be somewhat unusual in the second book. We have a princess who seemingly has an unusual aptitude with daggers revealed in book two of the Prophecies series. Oh really?
Well my motivation is to tell her backstory and pull in lots of those details that otherwise are interesting elements to a story, but would have distracted the readers of the other books. Let’s just say this otherwise unassuming cute little princess has a lot of things motivating who she is and why she developed the surprising skills she has.
This book focuses on her and another character who shall remain nameless for now. Being that it will also be written in first person, I will be trying to bring the reader deeper into the character — and since the protagonist is female, I am trying to bring more female audiences to the Fantasy genre.
Since the character will be very familiar to my other readers, I hope to actually have boys carrying a book with a “Princess” in the title and not think it is made of Kryptonite, but time will tell. The story will be full of all the things that audiences typically like — action, emotion, danger, surprises, familiarity, etc.
Ok, enough gushing about my latest project – time to write some more…
Oh and yes, I’ve been told that by the end of the summer, the first two books of my series will be going public (I’ll leave that to the publisher to detail things) and I am supposed to have PRINCESS INTERRUPTED ready for the November/December season.
Thanks,
Mike