My agent asked me specifics and I didn’t have them. At first, I wrote it just for the sound and cadence without a lot of consistency on what each word meant. Ha! I always laugh when I look back on that process.

Initially, some of the histories and prophecies came to me in whole gulps, but as I got to know and understand more about this world, I wrote more pieces to fill in the gaps.Ī post shared by Mary E Pearson on that topic, what was the process of creating the different languages like? What was the creation process like? Did you write these excerpts specifically for those scenes or did you select them from a larger collection? Within the Remnant Chronicles, there are often interesting excerpts, such as from the Morrighan Book of Holy Text and the Song of Venda. The cultural details grew from going to modern fairs and festivals and imagining them in a new way. One of those places was a little beach town in California, and another was the colourful island of Burano in Venice, Italy, that I visited some years ago and fell in love with. I’m a very visual person and I had a huge bulletin board full of pictures of various places and architecture. Where did you draw the inspirations from? The Kiss of Deception is set mainly in the summer festivities in a small village, and everything feels very fascinating, from the log wrestling to the Festival of Deliverance. They main point of it, really, was so the reader would give them both careful consideration, and not sum them up by their titles or outward appearance. I made slips along the way, but revision took care of that. Likewise, in the “Assassin” and “Prince” chapters, I made sure they didn’t talk about recent interactions with Lia that might exclude the other from being present. It was tricky! I had to be careful in the “Rafe” and “Kaden” chapters, that they only spoke of their immediate interactions in Terravin, and not their other lives. How do you balance between dropping enough hints such that the reveals would make sense, and making it suspenseful?

And that meant my voice was always last to be heard, which perhaps made me more of an observer and listener? Priming for a life as a writer? In the Kiss of Deception, we don’t know who Rafe and Kaden are supposed to be until much later.

Nope! Second daughter and last of the brood. A post shared by Mary E Pearson jump into the books.

The remnant chronicles book 3