ARTHUR ANDERTON

Twenty years ago, on a hot summer day, a twelve-year-old boy and his cousin were musing about what it might be like to suddenly find themselves in a magical world. She was an avid Michael Crichton fan, and he loved unique fantasy like the His Dark Materials series (before it was cool). The boy left his cousin's house and started mulling with the idea during the four-hour drive home to Orange County. When he got home, he sat down with a notepad and a pencil (it was the '90s) and started to write. He completed nearly nine chapters before the boy turned thirteen and junior high started, homework and girls commanding all of his attention from then on.

 

The story sat in a box for many years until the boy moved to his cousin's town and they reminisced about the many stories they had concocted while playing make-believe as kids. Suddenly, the boy remembered his nine chapters, and immediately dug them out of the box he had buried them in. He read the chapters and grabbed his laptop to adapt it. A twelve-year-old boy had written about a couple of kids, and the boy was nearly a man now. The story needed to grow with him.

 

For the next four years, the story would shift and change, taking on many forms until the boy, now a man, was finally happy with where it was going. As his story matured, so too did his reading. He came to realize after reading several other fantasy novels that his story was chock full of clichés. There's no point in telling a similar story as has been done so many times before, so the story was once again buried in a box.

 

The man's life started taking him to places he had never been and jobs he had never imagined doing. From the golden hills of California's Central Coast, to the cacti-peppered deserts of Arizona, and into the verdant forests of the Pacific North West, the man's life experiences expanded, and he found inspiration in the many regions he had seen. Fantasy was growing in the mainstream, too, and so many fresh stories were being told.

 

The man started writing an entirely new story, laboring over every word and detail, until he had 100,000 words ready for submissions. Alas, a year would go by with no agents picking up his story, and the world found itself amid a pandemic. His cousin had become a teacher, and he called her to make sure she and her wife were staying safe and healthy during the unprecedented times. They talked for hours about everything, once again reminiscing about their childhood games and imaginative stories.

 

The man remembered, again, and dug out the blue three-ring binder that held the story he had started so long ago. He read through the clichés, plucked out the ideas that felt more original, and set to work on a complete rewrite. Only a chunk of the original plot and a single character had survived the many retellings over the years, and he wove a new world and new characters around them. This story in its new form is The Winter Court, the culmination of twenty years of writing, passion, and relentless devotion to realizing the story's potential. The first draft was completed on December 5th, 2020. Queries failed, the project sat through the pandemic and was dusted off in November of 2023 to be almost completely rewritten into what it is now. The second book was written in quick succession to the first, and is, in the man's opinion, even better.