Before it was a novel, The Hidden King was a dream.
I don't mean this in a metaphorical way--I mean that I woke up one summer Sunday morning and, ensnared by the pictures in my head, didn't open my eyes for another twenty minutes.
I leapt out of bed with hair akimbo, and, snagging a bowl of leftover spaghetti for breakfast, became one with my laptop. I laid on the floor, ready to unspool the dream from my head in ten pages or so, as is customary for me. The Hidden King, though, wouldn't cooperate.
Ten pages? it murmured. Fat chance, you fool. Try one hundred thousand words.
I, a helpless medium for the writing-creature in my brain, typed until my fingers ached. I complained to the writing-creature. I bargained. I told it that if it would let me do my actual work that I really had to do, then I'd stay up until three in the morning to be its little writing slave.
Three in the morning sounds good, it said. We'll do that.
So I wrote. I wrote so much that the length of my first draft weighed in at about 148,000 words--for reference, the final version (that hopefully you will own) is half that.
Even if I thought I could stop writing, I wouldn't. It's part of me, woven into my identity. It is a gift I'll never stop being grateful for.
