A few thoughts about book one and the Broken Spell series :
Names are important, aren't they?
Brave & True. I think names can be a little bit magical. I like to start a story with bold names and those two came to me very quickly. Pretty soon after, the naming convention of creating characters' names from character traits and virtues fell into place. Now, making up the names as I go along and collecting ideas from life around me is a favourite hobby. My latest idea is to call somone Neb, from the word nebulous. "Hey Neb, get over yourself!"
The main charactersBrave is a 13 year old boy and True is a 17 year old girl and let's just say, they don't start out as friends. They're from different worlds and they're very different people navigating a river of distrust and misunderstanding.
Here's a description I wrote some time back to send to my wonderful developmental editor Jasmine Gower, so she'd get to know both characters a little before she started reading:
Brave Kingsfort - character description (some spoilers)
Brave is a smart mouthed 13 year old boy prone to Mum-intolerant wise cracks living in an ordinary town on planet Earth. When he’s bullied into a temper tantrum that sets off actual thunder, he discovers his mum has been lying to him his whole life. Turns out he’s ex-pat royalty from another world, on the most-wanted list of a pseudo-queen and most likely has some kind of nature-loving-elemental superpowers. Just when he decides things couldn’t get any more weird, a terrifying portal sucks him, his mum and his mysterious new uncle away to Arvalonia. Three separate parts of Arvalonia of course.
True Harboursfort - character description (some spoilers)True Harboursfort’s an entitled teenager from a well-known Arvalonian family with magical, shapeshifting issues the size of a horse. To be specific, a flying horse. When the false queen Mallevia attacks the secret mage school she attends in Arvalonia’s northern rainforest, she and the rest of her classmates escape into the mysterious dunes of the Inner Heat. Fending for herself for the first time, she’s forced to confront her weaknesses, the lies her family holds dear and her newfound, unstable abilities. When Mallevia’s enchanted green guards capture the rest of the students, True escapes and is found by recent arrival Brave and his new friend Rat, a camel riding desert man with a mysterious past.
The back story for this book
The Dangers is based on a story I wrote back in 2014 called Brave's Journey. That novel was shortlisted for an award and published by IFWG Publishing Australia. A lot of kind people read and enjoyed it and believed in it enough to publish and I'm so grateful for that.
But this is a whole new story.
It's bigger, badder, better (I hope) and above all, braver. For one thing, I've made sure True's story is heard as much as Brave's. Most importantly, it's a spring board for a series of six books.
Here's the summary of the Broken Spell series ... (see the timeline below)
When an ancient protection spell is broken by a pretender queen, a hungry enemy begins to rise again. With the means to fight the monsters buried in legend, the people of Arvalonia have little defence, until the reluctant heir to the throne Brave, a shapeshifter named True and an unlikely bunch of young allies discover their combined elemental magic talents can be used in unique ways.