Guest Post and Giveaway: Shona Husk

Please join me in welcoming author Shona Husk to Debbie's Book Bag today. Shona is here promoting her newest book, The Outcast Prince. I asked Shona about her inspiration for this new series. Please enjoy her guest post and see the giveaway details at the end of the post for your chance to win a copy of The Outcast Prince.

Nailing down Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing, quite often I don’t recognize what it was until much later. Sometimes I’ll see something and think that’s a cool idea or a great picture and I often cut out newspaper articles and drop them into my ideas box. I don’t actually look in the ideas box very often, but I like to have it there :)

For the Annwyn series there was a cool idea but on reflection it probably won’t make sense to anyone else. But I’ll share and let you make your own mind up about the weird working of my mind.

I was taking my kids through a maze and we were talking about things that mazes could be made of. We ended up talking about glass mazes and how that wouldn’t work…or would it? Because while you can see the middle, there is still no clear path. 

A glass maze…cool (and thank you eldest kid!). I stored that away for later not knowing how I’d use it.

Six months later I was at an engineering conference (those things would be greatly improved with free books and more interesting panels. So instead of ‘water quality in drainage systems’ maybe ‘how to build a realistic alternative reality’?) After two hours of listening to testing methods and outcomes my mind had well and truly wandered and I was thinking about those glass mazes again and how that would work in a story.

There is no glass maze in Annwyn, however it does represent the Court (to me) as the characters can see what they want, but getting through the fairy politics isn’t easy. It was the second book that formed while I was at the conference, and I knew it was the second book as I made notes (I must have looked so interested in drains ;)).

The hero for The Outcast Prince, Caspian, had been in my mind for a while but I didn’t know what he was only that he was psychometric and didn’t really fit in. When I added the fairy part of the story everything fell into place.

Researching fairy law gave me more ideas than I can use in the series. News reports of drug resistant TB and outbreaks of measles and other viruses gave me an effect that the failing magic of Annwyn could have on our world.


For me, the original idea that sparks the story isn’t always recognisable in the story as I travel so far from that first thought. Other times I have no idea where the story idea came from and it just kind of grew out of all the ideas that have been tossed into the ideas box and put away for later. 

Giveaway Details:

The publisher is sponsoring a giveaway for one copy of The Outcast Prince by Shona Husk.

~ You must be an email subscriber to participate.
~ US and Canadian addresses only.
~ The deadline to enter this giveaway is Midnight EST, July 17th.

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