have a gift for you lovers of romance and lovers of fantasy: my newest series, Gods Save the Queen. In this blog I'll walk you through the creation of this series and what you can expect.
It all started on a disc-shaped planet that roamed the multiverse. The ten-thousand-mile in diameter disc sat on the backs of four gigantic elephants, who stood on the back of an enormous sea turtle that swam through space. This discworld was the creation of Sir Terry Pratchett, an amazing writer that I adore and try to fashion myself after. I love the discworld so much, I wrote eight fan-fiction novellas on that discworld, and got some wonderful feedback from the readers.
The problem I had was that the stories were quite good but I couldn't go anywhere with them. While Sir Terry's estate allows writers to write fan fiction, it does not allow them to profit off of his material, and his daughter is aware of my stories. What to do… what to do… I'll just have to extract my stories from Sir Terry's universe and make my own universe. There were some things that were strictly "Discworld Only," so I had to do some serious thinking. I couldn't just plop my story on an earth-like world; I had some serious universe building to do.
So we start with a solar system. My star is named Thaal, a Sol-like star that is circled by two planets: Zigu, a huge planet with a solid nickel-iron core that is the inner planet. The next planet out is Kodu, a smaller, Earth-size planet with an iron-nickel core. Every 88 days, or four times every Kodu year, Zigu and Kodu pass close together. The gravity/magnetic field of Zigu causes the core of Kodu to tremble, which causes the stars to shudder if you looked up. The inhabitants of Kodu call this the Stardance, and it's said that babies made on a stardance evening grow to be strong and lucky. Because of the orbital ecliptics of both planets, the Stardance in Autumn is most noticeable.
Kodu has three moons for multiple reasons. It used to have one, but at one time in history, Zigu was the outer planet, and the gravitational pull of a rogue planet pulled Zigu inward to the inner orbit it has today. One of its moons slammed into Kodu's moon, showering Kodu with a year-long meteor shower that destroyed every city on the planet. When the shower was over, Kodu had a series of rings that used to be it's moon, and it picked up three other moons. These moons are Kuu, a large, ringed moon; Rahn, the crimson moon which has three rings; and Livi a tiny, bright moon that's often not seen because it's normally in the daytime sky.
Next week, we will talk about life on Kodu, who is there roaming the planet, what they drive, what kind of animals you may see as we explore Kodu with some of its inhabitants. The Gods Save the Queen series is available on Zbookstore.com and Bookapy.com.