Behind the Scenes - Heirs of Falcon Point

Heirs of Falcon Point is a family saga written by four authors from the same publishing house.
I (Paige Edwards) came up with the original idea around the time Sian Bessey visited Washington D.C. Traci and I drove up from Stafford, VA, to meet Sian; on the drive to D.C., I shared this concept for a multi-generational story with Traci, beginning with a World War II family with three children, which time-jumped to a contemporary story about those children’s descendants. She thought it held merit, so we shared it with Sian when we arrived at the museum.
Most of our visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum evolved around how we could give life to my idea. First, we determined this story should have multiple genres that appealed to a wide audience: historical, coming-of-age, contemporary romance, and romantic suspense. We had one problem, we needed someone to write the historical leg of the story. (While Sian writes historical, she has not done a WW2). I brought up A. L. Sowards, another author from our publishing house, who had written several World War II novels. Traci and Sian agreed she'd be the perfect fit. We texted the idea to A. L., and lucky for us, she agreed.
After numerous brainstorming sessions from multiple time zones, A. L. started the historical leg in WW2 Austria. Then I lead off the first segment of the contemporary section, followed by Sian and Traci.
The original concept for HEIRS OF FALCON POINT was to connect a series of novellas with all of us contributing to the conclusion. However, when Traci started her section, it just wasn’t working. The pacing was off (this is one of her strong suits), so she took one of the villains I had created, tweaked him a little, then used him as a point of view character. Then she wove her portion of the story throughout mine and Sian’s. It was a brilliant maneuver on her part and really picked up the pacing. This adjustment led to adding a few of my and Sian’s scenes into the latter section of the novel.
Heirs of Falcon Point begins in 1940 on a fictional Austrian estate called Falcon Point. I’m an interior designer by trade. To convert an estate into a money-making resort requires numerous amenities, one being transportation. So I hunted down a location in Austria where railroad lines could be added to justify converting this estate into a four-season resort. As for Falcon Point itself, I based the mansion off a family estate once owned by my mother’s people in Falkirk, Scotland, called Callendar House (yes, that’s the correct spelling). I had toured the property six weeks prior and determined to use it as the Falcon Point mansion in the story.
Independently, A. L. Sowards did her own research and chose to set the historical portion in 1940, beginning shortly after the Anschluss. She and I created the setting that ultimately became the framework for much of the novel. Other sections were set in Amsterdam (Sian’s section) and Vienna (Traci’s). We were fortunate that all of us have traveled to or researched the various locations, so it was easy to work together on those settings. Another blessing that came from pooling our resources was relying on each others' strengths. I feel it made the book much stronger.
Fun Fact: Traci is former CIA, so we had to send the manuscript to the agency’s publication review board for approval before submitting it to our publisher. So even though Sian, A. L., and I have never worked for US intelligence, we’ve been cleared by the CIA.