I'm excited to announce the launch of my next book, The Silver Skull! This is the tenth book in the Rove City series and is the continuation of Maybelle's story from The Silver Arm.
This book is a retelling of a lesser known Hungarian fairytale called "The Lover's Ghost." Most fairytale retellings focus on more commonly known fairytales, like "Cinderella" or "Beauty and the Beast," but you might have noticed I keep picking less common tales to continue the Rove City series. This is for a specific reason.
When I started Rove City, it was initially supposed to be a series of standalone stories about different people in the city. There was no planned series arc and I had no intention of writing more stories about each individual character. But as I progressed through the series, the number one request was: "MORE."
At first, I wasn't sure how to handle it, but then I came up with the idea for a second story for El (from Midnight Wings and Midnight Flight) and had an idea for a series arc, and voila! here we are.
But the number one challenge has been continuing to do fairytale retellings while simultaneously crafting stories that are true to the original characters and that push forward the series arc. This means, I have to look far and wide for tales that I can work with. It also means taking some liberties with the retellings that I might not otherwise have taken.
I read through a couple dozen fairytales before I found “The Lover's Ghost,” searching for a rough structure I thought I could use for the story I had in mind for Maybelle and Amarok. The key difference of course, is that Amarok is not, in fact, a ghost—but merely ghost-like, in the sense that Maybelle can't find him.
The ending is also slightly different. But no spoilers!
As a little add-on you'll find that I included a me-written version of the original tale at the beginning of the book, should you wish to read it. You can also read it on my blog. I will likely be doing this moving forward, to make sure my readers are familiar with the tale in question, if they want to be.
The world of fairytales is vast! And there are so many wonderful stories to explore. But culturally, our knowledge of them tends to be restricted by the stories Disney has produced as films. But so many more interesting and quirky fairytales exist than just those few. I'm excited to be able to explore more of them with you!
