It was in the midst of the dark days of the pandemic. I had turned in the last book in The Consultants series in May of 2020. The worst thing that can happen to a writer hit me right after that.

Burn out.

I had written three books in eighteen months to fulfill my contract. On top of that, the anxiety of the early pandemic was crushing me.

I couldn’t write a word.

So I did what many of you did: I turned to reading to escape. Weirdly, I chose science fiction as my preferred genre, probably because it got me off this world and onto a different one. I became addicted to a series known as the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. It had characters that leaped off the page—especially the main hero, Miles Vorkosigan—and a fascinating universe, including three planets ruled by an emperor. I ripped through all 16 novels and the various associated novellas before I started at the beginning and read them again.

A spark of inspiration kindled in my brain. No, I wasn’t going to write science fiction, but I wanted to do world-building like Ms Bujold did. I still needed to escape from the real world situation, so I decided to set my barely flickering idea of a story in a brand new country that I constructed from the ground up. That country became Caleva (which is a mash-up of two Spanish words: caliente, meaning hot, and vaho, meaning mist or vapor, because the island is volcanic and there is still geothermal activity in some areas.)

Oh, I have had such fun waving my magic wand to create miraculously medicinal Calevan lilies that cure dementia. I love dragons but I don’t write fantasy, so I’ve had to enjoy them only in other people’s books. Then a friend sent me a postcard with a dragon-like lizard called a plumed basilisk. Thus was born the giant Calevan frilled dragon, featured on the country’s coat of arms.

Miles Vorkosigan is a nobleman on his world, related to the emperor. I loved all the court intrigue, so I waved my wand again to bring forth a monarchy, headed by the very hot silver fox, King Luis IV. Then I conjured up the royal family around him.

Gabriel, Duke of Bencalor

Gabriel, Duke of Bencalor, burst out of my brain and into the story. He’s a royal duke, third in line for the Dragon Throne, and he plays flamenco guitar. Not to mention that he made a great sacrifice to save his cousin, Prince Raul, whom he grew up with and loves like a brother.

Quinn had to be an American and utterly unsuitable to be the romantic partner of a royal duke. She has an ugly past that’s a matter of public record and a father who’s a con man. But she is also brilliant, independent, and perceptive.

Then I had a ton of fun creating the secondary characters: the royal family (who will get their own books), Quinn’s father and uncle, and Quinn’s dark, enigmatic boss, Mikel.

I wrote with joy and abandon, letting the characters and story take me wherever the Muse wanted to go.

That was great for my creative brain, but my business brain looked at the word count and said, “Uh-oh!” I was already at 100,00 words (by comparison, my previous novel, The Agent, was 86,000 words) and the story was nowhere near finished. I might have cursed a bit at that moment.

So I tried to turn Gabriel and Quinn’s story into two volumes. I wrote a dramatic suspense scene for the end of Volume I. I made myself cry with the final emotional moments of that volume. Then I launched myself into Volume II.

About a third of the way into Volume II, I stalled out. I didn’t have enough story left to support a whole second book. At the same time, my publisher said they didn’t want a two-volume story. I didn’t blame them, honestly. I didn’t either. But that meant that I was going to have to self-publish this book.

What might have been a disappointing rejection became a liberating release.

I ripped out the dramatic suspense scene and gut-wrenching emotional climax at the end of Volume I, tore up the opening scene of Volume II, mashed together the two volumes, and kept going. Since this was going to be a long book no matter what, I set my Muse to dancing for as long as she wanted to boogie.

As a result, when I finished, Royal Caleva: Gabriel was a whopping 154,000+ words long!

There was a lot of editing ahead of me. So much that my right eye sometimes stopped functioning properly. When that happened, I would keep it closed and peer at the screen with only my left eye. Eventually, I whittled the book down to 143,000 words, which translates into roughly 548 printed pages. It’s a BIG book.

I like it that way. I wanted to give you, my wonderful reader, an immersive experience, a way to escape from this world and dive into a new one. My fictional world has its own problems, of course, but they get resolved and you can always count on a happily ever after.

Join me in traveling to the island country of Caleva, eight hundred miles off the coast of Spain, where lilies bloom, dragons roam, and sexy dukes play flamenco guitar.