A question I have been asked on several occasions is, where do my characters come from?
      Well, to be honest, that would ultimately be me!
      While my poor old brain box has had a few backfires over the years, along with the usual ups and downs that everyone goes through in life, I have come to deal with reality by basically leaving it behind. More often than not, many of the trials and tribulations that have cropped up in my life have appeared at first daunting and, to be frank, often pretty scary. As such, I have discovered that if I take a metaphorical step back and create a world in which I can deal with things, often the solutions become clearer.
      **A quick warning here, this is my way of dealing with stuff, and is no way considered as advice for anyone else dealing with their own problems. You’re not laying that one on me!**
      However, I digress. Having spent the whole of my life reading books from the moment I learnt to open one (even pictures can send your imagination onto a wonderful journey). The idea of transporting my mind elsewhere is not a difficult one, and many characters, even as a child, have sprouted out of my imagination. But it is those that emerged during early adulthood that have stayed with me; evolving with my own life experiences and knowledge.
      I have boxes of notebooks, full of stories that are unlikely to ever see the light of day. But at the time, to write my thoughts down was, and is, a means of dealing with things I find difficult to face in the real world; working out the painful bits by placing them in a safer, fantastical place. And through all of this has been my main characters, who are the lynch pin of my story, Blue Star Rising and latterly Sapphire Tree. There are eight in all, seven guys and one woman; all with their own personalities and back stories. I know them as well as my closest family and friends, and if they were to walk into a crowded room, I would still be able to pick them out instantly. I’ve witnessed their good times and bad, their positive traits and their darker sides. All very different, sharing a world I made just for them.
      So who are they really?
      Well, to be fair, and possibly making it even more likely someone will be ordering a straight jacket in big bird size, my characters are people who I have grown to have the deepest respect for. They have the ability to make me laugh, cry, get angry and even motivated when I’m at my most can’t be arsed moments. Needless to say that there was going to come a time when they wanted to finally get out and meet a wider audience.
      Over the years, I have created many scenarios in which Jean meets Nathan and the Knights, but the one that appears in Blue Star Rising was a product of an unusually hot summer of 2018 in Aberdeenshire. There were a lot of very red and sore Scots walking around that summer; but it gave me an opportunity to walk miles in the blazing sunshine that I wasn’t going to miss. The story began to unfold in my mind; many parts have since been elaborated and added to the final manuscript, while other parts were left out - after all, even my characters are entitled to a certain amount of privacy.
      Of course, when you have spent over thirty years building worlds and characters, one book is never going to be enough. Therefore, as those who have been kind enough to read Blue Star Rising will attest to, there are still many questions that need to be answered and more mystery to uncover. And so Sapphire Tree has taken the story of the Kelan Sagas forward, where Jean and Nathan, along with their fellow Guardians, take the reader further into their story, with book three, Royal Blood, slowly unfolding on the page, bringing this current Trilogy to its dramatic conclusion.