Writing the Virtus Saga is a real
challenge, particularly since I’m still not sure on how to go about creating a
series. Mine, believe it or not, built and developed on its own starting from a
concept and a recurring image. Simply worded, the concept is:
As part of a vast social
experiment, the planet Sendar is controlled by a technologically advanced
mechanical device that channels people's aggression into sex, which guarantees
their feudal society knows no violence.
As for the recurring image,
it was of a lone rider, lost in a place he should have known like the back of
his hand, who finds shelter from a coming thunderstorm in a beautiful woman’s
run-down shack. Too familiar to be a stranger, she feels like she belongs to
him, yet he has no memory of ever having seen her or of knowing her name. And
why does she look like his twin, even if he’s sure there’s no blood relation
between them?
Makes no sense, right? Well,
it didn’t to me either, but I kept writing, hoping things would clear up
eventually, and oddly they did. As the plot thickened, details added up,
fitting inside a structure I had not thought out beforehand. As incredible as
it sounds, it felt like I was reading it, rather than creating it. Yes, like any other reader starting from Book 1, The Sex, I had
no idea where I was going or why characters behaved the way they did. Thus came
Book 2 The
Game, then Book 3 The Festival,
Book 4 The
Leader, Book 5 The Pledge
and Book 6 The
Heat, all currently released by eXtasy
Books and available at major bookstores including Amazon,
Barnes
& Noble and Kobo.
Still, Virtus is far from over. All those who read it
know The Heat
ends with yet another cliff hanger, which requires a Book 7, The Princess,
and also a Book 8, The Demon, the final chapter on Prince Duncan
Caldwell, his lover Lord Christopher Templeton, and their woman, Lady Ylianor
Templeton.
Of course, by now I do have a sharper idea on where my
characters are headed, but until I’ve written the words The End, I’m not betting
on it LOL. Safe to say, my husband, who
has read the entire saga so far, has a greater grasp on my characters, knows
them far better than I do, and is also pointing to the ending that is most
logical with the premises. When he told me about it, I couldn’t believe it!!!
All I had was a concept and an image, while he had the whole story down pat. Go
figure!
In a way, though, he’s right. It was the characters
themselves who guided each and every twist and turn, so it shouldn’t have
surprised me they would point to their own ending. After the first image, they
continued to play inside my head until the lone rider turned out to be a
handsome, dark-haired prince, his long raven black hair flying wild as he dares
nature’s hostile elements on his black horse, until a trembling candlelight
draws him to the woman he’s destined to meet again, Ylianor Meyer. And she’s
not a sibling, not a twin, not a blood relation at all no matter how similar
she looks to him. Still, she is someone he’s grown up with, so why can’t he
remember her at all, as though his memory had been wiped clean of her?
Like any other reader, I found the answer to this
riddle, as well as to the similarity without blood relation, in Book 4 The Leader and Book 5 The Pledge, which proves how little the
characters shared while I was writing, telling me only what they wanted me to
know when they wanted me to know it, no earlier. From the first line to the
last, I just received pieces of a puzzle that eventually made up a great story
that still amazes me for its complexity.
Christopher Templeton is the key to the whole design,
although he came to me after Duncan falls for Ylianor. With his blond good
looks, erotic elegance and cat-like sensuality, he quickly overshadowed every
other character. Being the egotistical narcissist he is, he would have done
anything to have the most eligible, powerful and handsome man around—Prince Duncan Caldwell, Leader of the High Council—and kept everyone else, women in particular, away from
his beloved prince’s heart. Yes, he’s a tad jealous and has been since
the phase, but then his love for the dark-haired heir of the Caldwells is so
strong and deep, it overpowers any other feeling, especially since it’s
combined with one of the strongest powers or Virts on the planet Sendar.
In time, I’ve come to love how Chris defends his
territory, fiercely eliminating competition, doing his dammed best to make sure
things stay the way they are. Yet, he’s also the first to anticipate the
changes he can’t stop, adapting to them even if they mean having to share the
person who is the very reason of life itself with a woman. It’s what makes Lord
Templeton so intriguing and attractive in his own demon-like style—unpredictably evil at times, terribly open-hearted at
others, capable of a love so all encompassing he’d be willing to sacrifice
everything to it, his life included. Such depth of feelings turns the story
around, and only after I was writing it for a while, did I understand what the Virtus Saga
was really all about.
If you strip off the sex, the fantasy trappings, the
Virts and the power, what’s left is the slow, painful and very real making of a
trio. Building a successful ménage is no easy task. The three have to overcome
their separate resistances. They have to smooth out their rough edges. They
have to compromise and silence their egotistical drives. And they have to share
in the love and understanding. So their goal is to be one whilst being three,
keeping their individual identities while at the same time blending into a
single being greater than its parts, not because they have to save the world or
any such catastrophic event, rather because they want to become better persons.
And that’s a goal we could all have in our ordinary, day-to-day lives here on
planet Earth.
