I should say upfront that I'm not a royalist. I find the entire concept genuinely bizarre — the inherited power, the ceremony, the public money. I have never once looked at an actual monarchy and thought yes, this is a sensible way to run a country.
And then I wrote a royal romance.
I've thought about why, and the honest answer is that I wanted to live inside the fantasy version — the one with charming princes and centuries-old rules and a prince who governs completely. That last part turned out to be the whole design. Julian Aldric isn't decorative. He isn't a burden on anyone's taxes. He chairs the pharmaceutical regulatory committee personally because nobody else understands it well enough to protect his country's interests, and he's been doing his father's job for eleven months without the title that would make it official. If I was going to spend a year in a principality I don't believe in, I wanted the man at the top of it to be doing actual work.
Where it came from
It started with four brothers. That's genuinely all I had — four of them, devilishly handsome, famous across Europe, the kind of family the press can't stop photographing.
Julian arrived loudest, which is ironic given how controlled he turned out to be. He stood out so immediately that he became the eldest by default. Lucien was supposed to be the openly resentful one — vocal about hating his position, vocal about resenting his brother. He refused. He went quiet and controlled instead, which is far more interesting and far more difficult to write, and there are things about him coming in Book 2 that come from somewhere quite personal for me. I'm not ready to say more than that yet.
Nicolas and Felix were the hardest. All I knew was that they had to be very different from the older two, and it took a while to work out what that actually meant. Once I did, the family bonds rearranged themselves without much help from me.
Céline came last. A girl as the baby of the family felt completely natural to me, which took me an embarrassingly long time to connect to the fact that I am the youngest in mine.
Where it fell apart
There's a stretch in the third act where Julian lets Imogen believe he's chosen the crown over her, and she leaves.
This nearly broke the book.
My own logic kept telling me it was ridiculous. He could just tell her the truth. That's the obvious move, the sensible move, the thing any reasonable person would do — and every time I wrote toward it, the scene went slack. But the alternative was worse: if the reason for his silence wasn't airtight, Imogen leaving would read as petty. A woman storming off over a misunderstanding that one conversation would have fixed. I have read that book. I did not want to write it.
So the silence had to come from who Julian is — a man who has spent his entire life doing what the crown requires, retreating under pressure the way he has always retreated, at the exact moment it costs him most. And Imogen's leaving had to come from her own pattern, not from pique. She is very good at leaving. She has always called it freedom.
That was the hardest thing in the novel to get right, and it's the part I'd point to first if anyone asked what I'm proud of.
What it cost
This book took up my entire life. I don't have a more elegant way to put it. I worked on it constantly — weekends included, every gap I could find — and I couldn't stop. The whole series has been like this. I'm not sure that's healthy and I'm not sure I'd change it.
Now
It's self-published, which means it's out there with no machinery behind it except whatever readers decide to do with it.
I feel excited and terrified in roughly equal measure. It's not mine anymore. People will feel however they feel about it, and I've had to make my peace with that, mostly by not thinking about it very hard.
If you read it and it works for you, a review would mean a great deal — for a self-published book, a handful of honest reviews genuinely changes what happens next. And if you get to Chapter 26 and a certain one-word line lands the way it's meant to, I would love to hear about it.
Book Two is already pushing at the door. Lucien's face across a dinner table in the final chapter is doing considerably more work than it appears to be.
Thank you for being here.