Another exciting guest post to help celebrate a book release today! K.D. Edwards’ The Hourglass Throne, the third book in the Tarot Sequence, is out now and K.D. very kindly wrote us a post about how he first came up with the idea of the series.
So, get yourself comfortable, and have a read!
I will never, ever forget that day. Ever.
I’d spent a lifetime wanting to become a published writer. There were many, many unfinished chapters in my desk drawer. And book outlines. And series ideas. And random brainstorming notes. A lifetime of thoughts that, one way or another, boiled down to these IDEAS in my head: of a fantastic world with larger-than-life principalities. Of two men closer than brothers. Of a lost civilization.
Life got in the way. I moved around A LOT. If I was one of those old-school Family Circle comics, where you tracked all the shit the kid got up to by a dotted line around his neighborhood, my path across the USA would look like this: born in central Massachusetts, summers in New Hampshire and Cape Cod, school in Maine, moved to Boston, then moved to Denver, then moved back to Boston, then moved to Missoula, Montana. Five years there led to five years in Spokane, Washington. Then finally the last big move: to North Carolina, to be close to my relocated parents and sister.
The day came when there were no more excuses: just a blank screen. And I took all the ideas in my head, isolated the best of them, and created the following two-page world-building description.
Prologue
For my kind, the first sign our world was ending came on October 24, 1946.
Over the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, a V-2 rocket shot sixty-five miles into space to take the first-ever, grainy, black-and-white photo of the curvature of the earth.
As humans celebrated their milestone, my people brooded over what it meant. We watched with mounting unease as satellites and rockets were invented and launched, greedily capturing images of the planet’s continents and waters. The turning point—the final failure of our magics and illusions—came when Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, circled the earth in Vostok 1. From that unimaginable distance, his human eyes succeeded in doing what so many others had not: they pierced our veils. There’s reputedly a sound recording of Gagarin accused of being drunk when he told someone to run and grab a damned atlas.
What he saw was an enormous North Atlantic island, more or less on the same latitude as Massachusetts and Maine, about the size of Japan maybe a little smaller than the state of California.
Atlantis.
So the gig was up, and Atlanteans knew it. My people decided to put on their finest, drop the spells that had kept the homeland hidden for millennia, and reveal themselves to the world.
Have you seen the newscasts? Read about the riots? Watched footage of the crowded churches and highways?
The existence of Atlantis changed humanity’s perception of everything. We’d been the root of so much myth and legend. Forget Zeus and Odin and Shiva—we were the tricksters and thunder gods, the fertility deities and battle crows, the sorcerers and shape-shifters. We were the fae, and vampires, the weres, the undead. Humans had even pinched the names of our leaders and repackaged them into the mystical equivalent of playing cards. There really was a Hierophant and a Fool, a Devil and the Wheel of Fortune, Temperance and Justice. They are, collectively, called Arcana: twenty-two ancient men and women, each with the firepower of nations.
Humanity beheld our freakishness in all its glory, and decided the most sensible course of action was to destroy us.
The Atlantean World War was brief. The cost was high.
Magically radioactive wastes in the Pacific Northwest and half of Poland; the near-extinction of dragonkind; a viral plague that decimated the Atlantean homeland. A hundred thousand headstones, trillions in damage.
At the end, both parties sat down and signed a peace accord.
Flash forward to the late 1960s. By then, the last of the Atlantean race had gathered as refugees on an island off the Massachusetts coast, where they’d been steadily and secretly buying land since the 1940s. The settling of Nantucket (privately called the Unsettlement) would last three decades. In displays of magic unprecedented before and since, the Arcana came together to translocate abandoned human ruins from different parts of the human world. Virtually overnight they created a patchwork Gotham of brilliant, dense, staggering architecture. This vertical sprawl has become known as the city of New Atlantis.
Now, in the modern era, New Atlantis has settled its bones. It has become a world-class city with a world-class economy, powered by the talent and savvy of long-lived beings.
My name is Rune Saint John.
I am, before anything else, a survivor: of a fallen house, of a brutal assault, of violent allies and complacent enemies, of life among a people who turned their back on me decades ago.
Among those who matter I am known and notorious. I am the Catamite Prince; the Day Prince; the Prince of Ruin. I am the last scion of my dead father’s dead court, once called the Sun Throne, brightest of all Arcana, now just so much ash and rubble.
These are my accounts.
I will never forget finishing this. I remember where I was, where I was sitting, what time of day it was. I just knew. I freaking KNEW. This was my story.
I spent nearly ten years working on the world-building for a 9-book series before the first book was sold, let alone published. This prologue appeared in the second book. It doesn’t say anything about Rune and Brand – how funny I try to make them be. How much they love each other – two men bonded as companions from the crib. It doesn’t tell you how pervasive the LGBT+ elements are in the story – so pervasive I don’t even use the words “gay” and “straight.” Everyone is on a spectrum of sexuality. And it doesn’t tell you that while the series is filled with (hopefully) terrifying enemies and centers of power—the heart of the book is Rune’s growing, ragtag found family.
This is the project of a lifetime. But it all started with half-finished chapters, and ideas, and character archetypes that had been simmering for decades in my brain. There is ALWAYS value in that old work. ALWAYS.
And as someone who became a published writer after 40? And has hit his best level of success after he turned 50? (Just 50. I am barely 50. Not even 51 yet.) Don’t ever give up on your dreams and passions.
About K. D. Edwards
K. D. Edwards writes adult urban fantasy.
K.D. lives and writes in North Carolina, but has spent time in Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado, New Hampshire, Montana, and Washington. (Common theme until NC: Snow. So, so much snow.)
Mercifully short careers in food service, interactive television, corporate banking, retail management, and bariatric furniture has led to a much less short career in Higher Education.
The first book in his urban fantasy series THE TAROT SEQUENCE, called THE LAST SUN, was published by Pyr in June 2018. The third installment, THE HOURGLASS THRONE, is expected soon.
K.D. is represented by Sara Megibow at kt literary, and Kim Yau at Echo Lake Entertainment for media rights.
