"Inspired by Real Life Events!"

If there's one thing that writers absolutely hate being asked, it's "where do you get your ideas..." because I think for most of use they just sort of condense around us from a mind that is nosy and likes to ask "...but what then?"

However, in the case of my "Silver Throne" series, the answer is both clearer and weirder than that. The book is, low-key and in a very roundabout way, about this dude. (Points upward) For those of you who don't follow international affairs and have been living in a cave since February of 2022, that's Volodymyr Zelensky, the current president of Ukraine and one of the two short white men that I have never met in person who I would die to protect. (The other one is MN Governor Tim Walz.)

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I was working in Riga, Latvia. (In point of fact, I was suffering from COVID in Riga, Latvia which made all those initial meetings a ton of fun, let me tell you...) In Riga, amongst the horror and the disbelief was a profound feeling that if Ukraine didn't hold it would be them - both the Baltic countries in general, and Latvia in particular - next, and I remember those first desperate days when we lived in terrified expectation of a Russian breakthrough that never came. For the rest of my life I'll remember crying over the video the Ukrainian government took, with the President and his cabinet standing in Kyiv as the invasion went on promising that they were there with their people. And spending the next months waking up every morning, rolling over, and checking to make sure they were still alive before I even turned off my alarm.

I'd always been interested in The Winter War, and what it takes to win - even with a loss - an armed conflict against overwhelming forces, and that's a comparison that was made more than once in the early days of the war. So I started to think about how you become the kind of person who can do what Zelensky did -- and what Field Marshall Mannerheim did -- to stand in front of an overwhelming force and refuse to leave and refuse to run, and then lead your country to face down overwhelming odds. I was less interested in writing about being that kind of person than I was about becoming that kind of person. And, being a hopeful romantic at heart, about the role that love and having the right person standing beside you could play in that transformation

That's not to say that our darling Prince Hal is based in any way on Zelensky, because I can't think of two people who are more different. (Or that he's based on Mannerheim, who, as you will see in book two, is kind of an ass.) But that was the idea that was playing out in my head as I was thinking through the initial drafts and brainstorming of the story that became "The Silver Throne" and was the genesis and the seed of the idea.