Why Julian and Imogen Go First
Every series has to start somewhere, and for the Sorvaine books there was never really a question. It was always going to be Julian.
He was the clearest of the four brothers from the very beginning — the one whose personality arrived fully formed while I was still squinting at the others trying to work out who they were. (Lucien, as some of you now know, was originally a completely different man. Nicolas and Felix shifted too. Julian never did.) The heir had to be a specific way, and he simply was that way from the start. So the eldest brother gets the first book. It felt inevitable, which is a lovely feeling when so much of the rest of the process was not inevitable at all.
Then there was the small matter of who to put in front of him.
The slow burn I didn't want
A confession: I don't actually like slow burn. Left to my own devices I want people falling into each other at speed. But Julian and Imogen refused to be rushed. Every time I tried to hurry them, the story quietly told me no. So slow burn it became, not by preference but because it was the only thing that worked for these two specifically. I've made my peace with it. I've possibly even come around to it. Don't tell anyone.
Imogen also very nearly had a completely different job. A journalist made the most obvious sense — it's the easy, well-worn setup for a story like this, the reporter and the prince. I could not make myself do it. British attaché arrived instead and was immediately better: it put her inside Julian's world rather than pointed at it from outside, gave her a reason to be brilliant in exactly the rooms he lives in, and meant the tension between them could be professional before it was anything else. The easy option is not always the right one, which is a lesson this whole book taught me repeatedly.
Imogen, and the trouble with the middle
Imogen is a second child, and I leaned into a certain well-documented syndrome there: old enough to be capable, young enough to be overlooked, quietly convinced that being useful is the most reliable way to be seen. Her parents are lovely. Warm, attentive, entirely present. The wound didn't come from them; it came from the geometry of being in the middle of them. (If you know, you know. It's not easy being in The Middle.)
I'm not much like her in that specific way. I'm the youngest, and Céline got that particular piece of me. But I'll admit to one overlap: I am deeply conflict-avoidant. Any kind of confrontation makes me want to leave the room. So Imogen's habit of managing herself, of making things smoother, of not taking up space she's entitled to. Some of that came from somewhere real, even if I didn't plan it. Characters have a way of collecting little pieces of you when you aren't looking.
Julian, and being chosen for the wrong reasons
What drew me to Julian was one specific ache: the experience of being valued for what you represent rather than what you are. He didn't ask to be born first. He might have wanted something else entirely — he played piano seriously until duty took it from him, and honestly, I find fiction-author Julian or musician Julian genuinely compelling to imagine. The road not taken is right there.
You could call him a cliché — the dutiful prince, the weight of the crown, all of it. But roles come with clichés; that's rather the point of a role. What I wanted was the person underneath the expectations, and the specific loneliness of being wanted for a position rather than a self. Imogen, who takes his full attention completely for granted and is neither dazzled nor deferential, is the first person who accidentally hands him the thing he's never had.
A few things I'm just fond of
Julian reads fiction — fantasy, I'm fairly sure — and this delights me more than it should. A man who governs an entire country and unwinds with dragons. I love him for it.
Imogen's freckles. She's auburn and pale and unmistakably from somewhere rainier, and she stands out in a country full of dark hair and dark eyes. My own taste runs far more Mediterranean than Celtic, so it surprised even me that she arrived looking the way she does. But she was right, and I wouldn't change a freckle.
And the Fête Nationale chapter, which I love the whole of. Julian leaving his own reception early, openly, to be with her. For a man like him, in a life like his, that is about as loud a statement as he is capable of making. It's the closest thing to a declaration a prince can manage in a room full of people watching. I grinned the entire time I wrote it.
One thing I'd like to clear up
Julian is not cold. He is not distant. Please don't meet him and file him under aloof.
He loves his family enormously — all of them, fiercely. He has a real sense of humor. What you meet in Book 1 is a man who has retreated into his shell because everything got hard at once, and retreating is simply what he does when things become difficult. The distance between him and Lucien — once his closest brother — is a genuine grief he carries quietly through the whole book.
I'm looking forward to letting him relax a little as the series goes on. He's got more warmth in him than his circumstances have lately allowed. You'll see.
What the Crown Requires is now available as an ebook, paperback, and as a part of Kindle Unlimited.