I don’t know if you can even see any of the details or not… but this quick sketch of the upcoming battle in my novel: The Seven Kingdoms, is getting me rather excited… on so many levels…

It isn’t just the relying on my vast storehouse of military history knowledge and using it to try to convey a realistic clash between two armies, or the challenge this imposes on my imagination. It is the one hundred written pages that led up to this, the way the characters feel real to me, alive in every sense of the word… because you eat, sleep and dream with the characters you write about. It is the whole story that led our hero, Hildread Starrgarrd Halfmoon, called ‘Hildy’ for short, from a teenage princess who balked at marrying an evil prince and ended up kicking him in the nuts, and later to killing him in her very first battle, and finally to her leading a coalition army of resistance to the evil empire in the first real battle to stem the tide.

Saving the last free kingdom is just the first step in reclaiming the seven kingdoms. There is so much lying ahead, but first, my band of kick-ass princesses and their loyal followers have to survive this day. The people feel real, the trail that led to this moment feels real, andthe new methods of warfare feel real.

There is a real cast of characters in this novel, from so many backgrounds, thrown into a world that is falling under the forces of darkness, just doing the best they can to survive while taking a stand against the encroaching maelstrom. Now, this is England, standing alone against the Nazis… only their savior isn’t Eisenhower and a huge American army, but a handful of teenage royalty who refuse to knuckle under, and a ragtag little group of survivors from the other fallen kingdoms, leading a barely-trained local militia.

I never wrote a novel where I planned ahead so much. I never wrote from a female perspective before. It all began as a simple plan to take the genre of the princess adventure story back from the Disney corporation and try to do something new with it. To use the inherent clichés but not make it seem like anything else. These are the challenges I set to myself, that is my battle.

I hope I do as well with my battle as Hildy is about to do with hers…