Time for a new excerpt and story behind the story!

My next release, Runes of Revelation,  was part of the Thin Green Line series, picking up after Beyond the Shadows and Wings of Love. Clayton Chiles had made a cameo appearance in Wings and I knew he needed his own story. He's a composite character and a kind of bassakward tribute to someone I knew many years ago. That guy was as straight as could be, quite the ladies' man in fact, so it seemed a twist of poetic justice to make him gay! It's a private joke, really, and I suspect he is long gone from this earth and could care less now but anyway that was the start of this character. Of course there were other influences as well, and no character I have ever created is a sole and direct representation of any one person!

I loved Tolkein's elves and they feel so much more right to me than the scaled down pixie creatures of most fairy tales and 'cutesy' versions we usually see in literature and such from the last couple of hundred years. I feel sure,based in part on my study of the ancient Celts and their deities and demi-gods, that there was a race of super-human beings who were here at one time and left, maybe in dismay or disgust at the new race taking over the world! Maybe they had no choice and the parallel worlds split and diverged. I do not know but somewhere they exist and I am confident of that! I found the elven characters in The Lord of the Rings movies believable, maybe not quite as I visualized but closer than I might have expected. But I do not see Orlando Bloom as Aron. Not quite!

Years ago I worked on a fantasy romance about a magical male being who served as a guardian and closer of space/time gates and the earth girl who came to partner with and love him. The tale never quite gelled and is eternally consigned to that proverbial box under the bed but the idea stuck with me. Lo and behold, here came Arondel, emerging into the contemporary world with a mission and stern directives as to what he was supposed to do. But as so often happens, cupid's arrows go against every rule and sometimes manage to bond the most unlikely pairs. Actually though, Clay and Aron are not so unlikely at all ,even if they do not recognize it at first. 

I had so much fun with this one and the sequel that came out almost a year later, Runes of Redemption. In passing, pale gray eyes fascinate me and I've always connect them with the elven kind or fairie, with a mesmerizing power and an eldritch beauty that is nigh irresistable. Perhaps all elves do not have gray eyes but I think many of them do... And not the changeable hazel-gray of a number of humans but a constant color that does not reflect blue or green or violet just because one wears it. Mine are that kind of gray but then any elf blood (the Irish and Welsh do have a trace!!) from long ago has become very diluted over the eons.