Goodreads asked Steven Lochran:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Steven Lochran The PALADERO series was reverse-engineered from the idea I had for a completely different book. In that story, a brother and sister were searching for their lost father through a fairytale kingdom. Along the way they encountered a paladero, a term I coined for a cowboy-knight by combining 'paladin' with 'vaquero', the Spanish word for cowboy.

This character was very Han Solo-like, and he was the most interesting element of what ended up being an abandoned manuscript. But rather than let the whole idea go to waste, I decided to rescue the paladero character and repurpose him in a coming-of-age story.

Rather than the grizzled adventurer he'd originally been conceived as, he became instead a young orphan out to prove himself. I couldn't bring myself to rename him, though. He'd existed too long in my head as 'Josiah Sarif', even though that sounded too stuffy for a kid to go by. So I nicknamed him 'Joss', and everything unfolded from there.

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