Miscellaneous Facts

These are some of the miscellaneous facts connected with writing the Ellenessia's Curse series.

* I started writing the book while listening to Paula Cole's Hush. The image that came to mind, of the shrunken boy dying slowly in bed, was the trigger for how I began my novel, with Candale being in the same situation.

* I often reuse names and Gerian, Candale's father, and Davn, his father's bodyguard, are two names that I have used before in short stories. Keyla, a minor character, has since been reused in my 'Daydreams' short story. And because I am so bad at coming up with names, a few minor characters have been named with the help of a fantasy name generator.

* It was initially going to be a trilogy, but the first book, the Shadow Seer, was so long that I felt it had a better chance of being accepted for publication if Isplit it into two. But when it was finally accepted for publication by Writer's Exchange Ebooks, they asked if the two parts could be put back together again, returning the series to its triliogy status.

* The first book only took me a year to write, but I spent another 3-4 editing it.

* An earlier version of the first chapter of Book One was moderator's choice on Elfwood and it won on the Dream Passage competition for March-May 2004. This was a competition that was voted on by the public and the cash prize was the first time that I'd received anything for my writing.

* Books 3 and 4 (with book one split into two) were going to be set further apart than books 1 and 2, but I decided that this didn't work very well, after having written book 3. I then had to rewrite it.