Lighting the dark: Anne Bishop on The Shadow Queen

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Can Cassidy rise above the disappointed expectations of others to be a true Queen?

I have no clever explanation for how a place like the Realms came to be, or how a beautiful shell named Daemon Sadi took on the weight of personality and personal history to become a living, breathing man on the page. That’s magic, a kind of alchemy that happens when the mind and the Muse meet in the land of Story.

It’s a slow magic. Sometimes it takes months, even years, for a shell to become more than a name vaguely connected to a story idea.

Take Theran and Cassidy. Their shells have been around since I wrote *The Invisible Ring.* Then, all I knew about them was that Theran was a descendant of Jared and Lia, and Cassidy had red hair and hazel eyes.

That’s all I knew about them for years. So I explored other worlds, wrote other stories. I circled back to them from time to time, and each time I had a sense of them gaining a little weight, a little substance. And then one day they were ready to have their story told.

But I didn’t know them. We were acquaintances at that point. I knew the wants and needs that compelled them to take this journey, but I didn’t *know* them until I met them on the page and began to tell their story. That’s when I learned that they weren’t who I thought they were, and the story I was telling was so much more than the simple idea I’d started with years ago.

When I begin a story, I promise the characters that I will tell their story without judgment–that I will let them be who and what they really are. I record their struggles, their failures and, hopefully, their triumphs. As I meet them on the page day after day, they become more than the list of details that had shaped the initial shell. They become people who make me laugh, make me cry, make me angry, make me cheer. They take me outside of myself, and by doing so, let me explore another facet of the heart.

And isn’t that what Story is all about?

So here are Theran and Cassidy–shells who came to life on the page. May they walk through your heart as they walk through mine.

Anne Bishop

The Shadow Queen by Anne Bishop is now out across Australia.

Anne Bishop is the author of the Black Jewels trilogy, the Ephemera duology and the Tir Alainn trilogy, as well as numerous books set in the world of the Black Jewels.