The Arkainian Chronicles

​“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night.”

​Sure, Edgar Allan Poe’s unknown narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart was talking about killing the annoying guy whose eyes reminded him of a vulture, but the quote is fitting for the topic of this blog post.

On January 3, 2021, I was scrolling through Instagram. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this event would forever change the scope of my writing. I saw a picture posted by the very talented artist and sculptor Kevin Cassidy. I thought that it was a cool picture and saved the image in a folder called “Awesome Art.” I figured that was going to be that. I might look back and admire the picture once in a while, but I had no idea just how much that picture would change my life.

At the time, I was writing the outline for book eight in my Chosen of Bella Luna series. I really wanted to finish the series, which I thought I might be able to do in nine books. This penultimate book in the series was one I was excited to write. As I was working on the outline, though, my brain kept going back to the picture I’d saved in the Instagram folder. I tried to ignore it, but the muses in my mind work in mysterious ways, and I could not stop thinking of the image.

Finally, I figured that if I just jotted some ideas down, I could get my mind to release the thoughts of the picture, and I could get back to writing my outline. I thought wrong. The quick thoughts I'd planned to jot down turned into something that launched me outside my comfort zone with regards to my writing.

I love romance and I love stories, so you can imagine that I absolutely love romantic stories. That’s why I write in the genre that I do. But there’s so much more to my books than just romance. There’s often suspense and mystery. There’s always some humor. And then there are the characters I create. I may be biased, but I think I’ve created some pretty amazing and realistic characters.

I started out writing contemporary romance, but then because of a dream I had, I ventured into the realm of paranormal romance by introducing werewolves into the mix. Fun fact: the werewolf series, the Chosen of Bella Luna, was the book I was trying to write when General Lokun Abakkus demanded my attention. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I enjoy the subgenre of paranormal romance so much because, frankly, here anything can go. I had another dream after I bought my first gargoyle, and that led to the idea of writing a book about a gargoyle named Claude Pierre. I’ve not finished that book yet, but it, as well as probably four more in the series, is still in my mind and is still listed on the “Works in Progress” page of my website.
 
I had another dream about the government using the DNA of an unknown species to create super soldiers that could be used to the government’s benefit. Like my unnamed gargoyle book, this book has been started but not finished. I'd planned to finish Project 13 for the NaNoWriMo in 2024 (see the blog post: What the Heck Have I Been Up To? on 2/20/25), but that didn’t work out as I had planned. I still intend to finish the book, as well as probably four or five more in this series. You might have noticed that I have a hard time writing standalone books.
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What I’m trying to say with this long-winded explanation is all of these books, even the ones in a paranormal subgenre, were all well within my comfort zone. All of the characters were more or less human, or humanoid. All of the stories took place in the present time and all of them took place on planet Earth. The image that Kevin Cassidy brought into my life burst that little comfort bubble.

“The most interesting things in life happen just on the other side of your comfort zone.” ~ Michael Hyatt.

The thoughts in my mind about this picture I’d saved not only caused me to step out of my comfort zone, but it also forced me to do more as a writer than I had for any other book thus far. To create the story that was forming in my mind, I had to step off planet Earth and go even further than that to take a trip outside our solar system.
 
This is how General Lokun Abakkus and Star Shine Miller were created. The image I saved in Instagram was of a being that was definitely not human. The artist was making an image for Loki, the giant in Norse mythology. I decided to honor the art by using Loki in the name, and thus Lokun was the name I chose for the character. Star was so named because I envisioned what humans would be like if we discovered the ability to travel in space to visit other places. Star Shine has two brothers, Hal and Al, Halley Comet and Alpha Centauri.

​To bring this story to life, I had to create a race of beings who lived on a fictitious planet in a fictitious solar system. I had to create a landscape and an entire world. I had to create a language and a society for a race of beings that didn’t exist. I’m not a scholar as J.R.R. Tolkien was when he created the languages and lore in The Lord of the Rings. I’ve never studied linguistics nor am I even very knowledgeable about astronomy. I haven’t studied ancient cultures or current-day societal customs. I didn’t have any of that knowledge, but what I did have was an imagination.

And from my imagination a story began to develop. The Arkainian Chronicles is the story about Lokun and Star. It’s a story of how they met, how they fell in love, and how they ended up changing the world.  

The first book, Blood Bound, took a little longer to write simply because I had to create all the backstory before I could write the actual story. I had to envision what the planet of Arkainia looked like, what the personalities and character traits of Arkainians were like, and how and why humans came to be on Arkainia. While I was trying to jot down some ideas so I could finish the outline and write the book I’d intended to write when the image first appeared on Instagram, Lokun persisted in my mind. He stayed even when I wanted him to leave. So I decided to work this into his character. He’s rather tenacious and wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote his story. I finally relented and paused on the idea of writing book eight of the Chosen of Bella Luna series and instead wrote Blood Bound. Fun Fact: To this day, I still have not written book eight.

It took nearly a whole year to get the story where I was happy with it. I continually read it and edited it, always finding things to change. When I read the book to my favorite beta reader, my husband, he helped me develop the Arkainians even further. Adrian’s background is in English, and he finds linguistics fascinating. He came up with the idea that the Arkainian language was much more formal and rigid than English. I already had in the story that they were a literal race of beings. They didn’t understand metaphors, nor did they understand sarcasm. They spoke efficiently and didn’t use any superfluous words. This became a running joke among the humans in the story. Our language is rife with metaphors. I actually didn’t realize how much we use them in everyday conversation until I wrote this book. Blood Bound was finally published in March of 2023.

​I decided to write the second book in the series, Blood Born, for NaNoWriMo 2023 (the now defunct National Novel Writing Month). I had two main ideas that I wanted to accomplish in this book: Lokun takes control of the Sacred Mountain and Star gives birth (thus the name of the book). The first book basically followed Lokun and Star. It introduced characters who were with Lokun on his battleship and the characters in the city on Arkainia. They were different but all part of the main plotline. The story in the second book broke the main plotline into three subplot lines: Lokun and Star in the Outlands, Jorial and Zoken on the battleship in space, and Renald and Sturm in the city. Furthermore, I decided to complicate things, because why not, and create subplots of the subplots. Blood Born was published in July of 2024.

This brings me to the third book, Blood Blessed. I’m currently in the process of writing this book. I plan to complete the first draft in the next few days. The idea for this blog post came to me when I thought of how easily the ideas for this story came together. Before I began writing, I had some disconnected ideas, but nothing overall came to me as the point of the book the way it had in the second one. I know what I want to have happen in the fourth book. I was thinking this third book might end up being just a transition like The Two Towers in the Lord of the Rings series. The Two Towers is essential to the overall story but lacks a definitive purpose, other than getting from Point A to Point B. But as is the case with most of my stories, once I began writing, the ideas just came to me.

​I'm one who handwrites my outlines and ideas. This helps me to slow my brain down. I’m not a great typist, but I type much faster than I write. By slowing down and writing the ideas by hand, I allow my brain to just relax and the ideas seem to just come to me. I often vary from the original outline. The characters quite often decide to go in a different direction than I had planned them to go in, but hey, writing is a fluid process.

Last night, I was working out the details of how I wanted Blood Blessed to end. I closed my eyes and had some ideas. But it wasn’t until I went and got my journal and started writing the ideas down that it all came together. I planned out how the book was going to end. Currently, I’m at 108,540 words. I’ve written just over five journal pages of ideas, which will will probably translate to around 30,000-35,000 words once I flesh out the ideas in the story. I don’t understand how the muses of my imagination work, but I’m pretty happy that they seem to enjoy filling my brain with people and stories that are worth sharing.

I hope you give the Arkainian Chronicles a try. If you do read the books, I'd love to know what you think. Thanks for reading this blog post.