I’ve been getting questions from readers lately about...

I’ve been getting questions from readers lately about story ideas - where do they come from? How do I think up stories? etc. So I decided to tackle it here (very briefly) in regards to the Ministry of Curiosities series.

Sometimes the initial kernel for a story comes to me in the form of a title, a particular scene, conversation, the heroine or hero. The Ministry of Curiosities series began with Lincoln. I’m not sure if you can call him a hero since he doesn’t always show heroic behaviour, but that’s exactly how I wanted him to be. I wanted you to love him sometimes, hate him at others, and occasionally want to throw things at him. I pictured a man who was extremely competent in every way, except the most important one - dealing with other people. He was crystal clear in my head right from the start. I’d even picked an actor who looked like him to help me describe him on the page (hence the image of Aidan Turner as Poldark).

With Lincoln being larger than life, I knew I had to pair him with someone who wouldn’t take his crap, who saw past the cold facade and was capable of knocking him off his solid foundations. She needed to be someone he could respect, because his respect is incredibly difficult to win. Since I love the girl-disguised-as-boy trope, I decided to make her a street-smart, courageous woman fallen on hard times. The word necromancer had been popping into my head a lot too, so I incorporated that into Charlie’s character. It proved to be the key to unlocking the rest of the story. It might surprise you, but I had no idea Charlie’s father would be the infamous character he turned out to be until I was about half way through writing THE LAST NECROMANCER. The man I had created was eerily similar to You Know Who (trying not to spoil it here for anyone who hasn’t read it), and when I realised that, I couldn’t let go of the idea. With that character/book being out of copyright, I decided to incorporate him into the story. This meant going back and changing the ending to STRANGE HORIZONS too so that the clues matched.

So there you go. That’s how the Ministry of Curiosities series evolved, in a nutshell. As a fun aside, does anyone know which of my other books features the heroine disguised as a boy trope? It’s an oldie, and one of my personal favourites. The scene where the hero learns she’s a woman was absolutely fun to write. If you know which book, write it in the comments.