I can’t remember when I discovered fantasy stories. My best guess is inside a comic book panel or when I first saw The NeverEnding Story. It would be cool to remember something like that.

Hello Canada,

I wanted to be a fairy warrior princess when I grew up. My friends and I spent our recesses writing stories and acting out adventures: rescuing princes from evil wizards, practicing archery on horseback, attending balls to spy on a villainous lord.

I used to play dress up in long velvet gowns. I still do that, sometimes, but to be honest I think I look better in my black button-up shirt and floral-print bowtie. Gender is like that for me—dress up. It can be a lot of fun.

How did you get the idea for the Daughters of Light series?

The idea for the character of Jasmine originated from a student in my homeroom class who was being bullied so badly outside of class, she’d hide in her closet so that her mother would think she’d gone to school. This student’s mother had lupus, so the student didn’t want to worry her mum by telling anyone about the bullying.

The concept for Missing Piece, the final book of my Spell Crossed trilogy, wound up radiating through not only the plot and the characters but the form the novel took and the process of writing it.

Two of the main characters, Xemion and Tharfen, have previously had a collision in the frictionless borough of Shissilill. As a result, they have each come away with a piece of the other magically embedded in them. Much of the action of the book tells the tale of how Tharfen goes about trying to recover her missing piece.

My birthday is in July so going back to school was one way I kind of felt in sync with the outer world. Beginning each new grade I had a new age, a new season, new clothes   (or at least different hand-me-downs) and a new shot at something. Summer holidays were long enough that, come late August I was usually, if only secretly, beginning to make the equivalent of New Year's resolutions to myself about how studious and on time I would be. Not that I was a bad student.

Today Robert Priest, author of The Paper Sword, book one in the Spell Crossed series, talks to us about his new book, the series overall, and which character is his favourite!

Tell us about your book.

I consider myself an organized person. When I try to develop an idea for a book, I like to plan everything out. The whole story arc develops as I lay out every chapter and create a plan for writing and staying on schedule. If I don't have a checklist of things I need to take my characters though, I find my writing really slows down and drifts. That being said, the most important thing I know about making a writing plan, is that you need to be flexible. Maybe the plan happens exactly as you lay it out for some writers, but that's never happened to me. 

Today Allister Thompson guests blogs for us about what it was like to edit Lives of Magic by Lucy Leiderman. The first book in the Seven Wanderers Trilogy.

Allister: