She flouted the laws of sorcery. She besmirched the purity of her power when she took a life and so the curse shall take her.

When her sister triggers a deadly curse, Cassie-Anne Carpenter must leave the only home she’s ever known to find the hidden city of Ruen and beg the help of the exiled Goddess of Sorcery. But finding Ruen is no easy feat.

To get there, Cassie must face the dangers of the Emperor’s Highway: mercurial bandits, zealot priests, cruel sorcerers, and her own heart to return with a cure before autumn’s first moon. Or her sister will suffer the consequences of her failure.

I started writing Sorcery’s Ruin when I was twenty-four years old.

That’s a lie. I started writing Sorcery’s Ruin when I was sixteen. That very first draft… let’s call it draft zero wasn’t very good. But it was simple… a simple story set in a fantasy world. A story about a girl whose sister got sick and she had to leave home to search for a cure.

It had a good first-line.

The first day of spring dawned with a storm.

I didn’t make it very far with that story. I put it in a proverbial drawer (a hard drive folder, that I didn’t look at for years). I finished school, went to university, started work and didn’t think much of that story again. Not apart from that first line.

Growing up I used to read, in my mother’s words, a book a day. I loved fantasy, adventure, romance, and love. Epic quests and Gods and of course strong female leads, though it wasn’t really called that in the noughties.

When I was twenty-four I decided to write the book I’d always wanted to read. A story with all of those things. Adventure and love, sorcery and gods and a complex female lead. One that wasn’t a lady or a whore.

The problem I discovered with just writing that sort of story, is that it’s big. Those types of stories are long and the plots are twisted and they contain a whole host of side characters. A fantasy quest takes you across a world and shows you all the places between the farm and the palace and back again. Definitely not the sort of book to write as your first book. It becomes a trilogy a quartet or a saga, depending on where the story ends.

The current writing wisdom is that you should write a book in a season, three months for the first draft. I didn’t do that. I wrote a book in five years.

I’m thirty now, and I’ve just released Sorcery’s Ruin into the wild. It’s the first book in a saga, and it has an excellent first paragraph…

Deep in the valley of Riverfowl the first day of spring did not dawn; the season started with a storm so grim that no one noticed the sun’s journey above the horizon. An old stone cottage marked the border between the fields that fed the village and the Wilds. It sat at the very edge of man’s kingdoms like the last trailing star in the tail of a constellation. Men had lived in Riverfowl for so long that even the gods that were made had all but forgotten the ancient foe that dwelt beyond the settlement. They had forgotten the creature they bound to darkness when the All-Father was raised above them to be all-powerful and ever-present but never there. They had forgotten that so long as an enemy lives, they are never truly defeated. For the vengeance of a God is a game played in aeons.

It’s the story of a girl whose sister gets sick, and she has to leave her home to search for a cure. On the way, she meets mercenaries, sorcerers and gods. She falls in love, and she grows up. She learns all the secrets of a world that wasn’t meant for her. It’s a good story, you should read it, you might like it.

Sorcery’s Ruin, Book One of Therion’s Promise, is available to buy on Amazon.