A while back, shortly after the death of the late, great Paul Harvey, I blogged about his catchphrase - \"the rest of the story.\" As that blog post advocated,\u00a0the rest of the story can be a writer's best friend.\u00a0 This post is a follow-up to that one because even the rest of the story has a flip side.\u00a0 That flip side can be the rest of your story.<\/p>\n
A Faerie Fated Forever<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>was inspired by\u00a0my muse and I discovering\u00a0the famous Clan McLeod legend from the Isle of Skye in Scotland.\u00a0 That clan has a faerie flag and\u00a0shares blood with the wee folk thanks to a handfast marriage between a former laird and a faerie princess.\u00a0After a year and a day the faerie had to return home, leaving behind the laird and their infant son.\u00a0 The faerie returned to comfort her\u00a0son one\u00a0evening when music from a party drew his nurses away.\u00a0 Left alone for the first time, the baby cried and the faerie mother soothed her son by wrapping\u00a0 him in a special\u00a0cloth.\u00a0 The swaddling\u00a0cloth was a faerie flag that\u00a0could be used 3 times to save the clan.\u00a0<\/p>\n Well, that's a great legend, but my muse\u00a0had to finish it - to find the rest of the story.\u00a0 What happened to the laird who let\u00a0his faerie bride leave without a fight or a fine bargaining session with the King of the Faeries?\u00a0 Why didn't he at least try to renegotiate his deal with the King?\u00a0 And later, surely the then-single laird married.\u00a0 Let's say, he contracted a marriage\u00a0because the clan coffers were dwindling.\u00a0 How sad his forsaken faerie princess would have been on the laird's wedding day!\u00a0 And would her father, the powerful King of the Faeries, just stand idly by, doing nothing at his daughter's tears?\u00a0 Likely not.\u00a0 Why, surely, he'd have visited\u00a0the groom after the wedding and pronounced a curse on the lairds of the clan! The curse would have been aimed at making sure no future laird cast aside another beloved to wed for money or power.\u00a0 It would have been a curse of love.\u00a0<\/p>\n And so the rest of the story of the McLeod legend became\u00a0my first book in the Forever Series, A Faerie Fated Forever<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n While faeries may appear in the books at unpredictable intervals (the wee folk thrive on the unexpected, after all) the series isn't about faeries.\u00a0 It's about what strong alpha males will do to secure\u00a0their happily forever after.\u00a0 The whole series is a flip side of the rest of the story.\u00a0 Real life is too often about what women change, alter, amend or surrender in the name of love.\u00a0 What do the men face?\u00a0 What would we like them to face?\u00a0 Wouldn't we like to see men who've had it all their way for way too long get\u00a0so crazed with love that they'd surrender pride and duty and even do the thing they'd sworn never, ever to do?\u00a0 Of course we would, and in the forever series, they do just that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My brand new book, A Sixth Sense of Forever<\/a>, <\/em>is the flip side of Faerie<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 The hero of Sixth\u00a0Sense<\/a><\/em>\u00a0is Boz, the Duke of Sedgewick.\u00a0 Through his mother Boz is a cousin of Nial, the Laird of the Clan Maclee who descends from the union of Ian, the former laird, and a faerie princes and\u00a0had\u00a0a curse to overcome in Faerie<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0That relationship is well known and public.\u00a0 What isn't known, what is kept a close Sedgewick family secret, \u00a0is that through his father Boz\u00a0shares the blood of the rich woman Ian married after the faerie princess returned to the land of faerie.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n If the Clan Maclee has a curse to face after Ian weds another, then is it likely that the bride's family walked away unscathed?\u00a0\u00a0The Maclees face a curse of love that requires them to marry for love. The bride's descendents, the Sedgewicks,\u00a0\u00a0who have hidden their\u00a0family history\u00a0to hide the secret,\u00a0\u00a0face a curse forbidding them to marry for love.\u00a0 That's the flip side of the rest of the story and sets off the conflict <\/em>in A Sixth Sense of Forever<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Boz\u00a0faces a curse that says if he marries for\u00a0love, his bride will die before birthing a child.\u00a0 He does what dukes of his line have done for\u00a0many, many years - he betroths himself to a rich, powerful lady\u00a0who wants his wealth, title and consequence but cares not a fig for him.\u00a0 Having secured a future wife\u00a0he can never love, his task is then to find a mistress he can love because\u00a0Sedgewicks are cursed with an overwhelming abundance of the emotion of which\u00a0the ton\u00a0<\/em>believes them incapable.\u00a0\u00a0The book starts when Boz's best friends since childhood, the Malones, show up with a bizarre request - they ask him to give sex lessons to their little sister, Lily.\u00a0\u00a0Considering that favor forces Boz to face what he's made himself forget - he's been in love with Lily\u00a0for his entire life.\u00a0 Since he loves her and since sex lessons that are never meant to take her virginity bring him way too close to the marriage that would cost her life, common sense says he must refuse the favor.\u00a0 The sixth sense Boz inherited from his mother's faerie-kissed lineage argues otherwise.\u00a0 So what's a duke to do?<\/p>\n Like all my stories, Sixth Sense<\/a> <\/em>is a little tongue-in-cheek and a lot over the top.\u00a0 Will the voice of reason that Boz brought to Nial's courtship in Faerie<\/a><\/em>\u00a0 and to Colt's in Golden<\/a> <\/em>stand him in good stead when he faces his own delicious dilemma?\u00a0 Absolutely not because a man in love in one of my stories is in for a bout of crazed passion that will defy reason and destroy common sense.\u00a0<\/p>\n A Sixth Sense of Forever<\/a> <\/em>will take the reader on a precarious and improbable ride over the\u00a0top\u00a0with a handsome hero who has everything except the one thing he can't live without.\u00a0<\/p>\n Check it out and let me know how you enjoy the journey!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A while back, shortly after the death of the late, great Paul Harvey, I blogged about his catchphrase - \"the rest of the story.\" As that blog post advocated,\u00a0the rest of the story can be a writer's best friend.\u00a0 This post is a follow-up to that one because even the rest of the story has ...continue reading \"The Flip Side of The Rest of The Story\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":722,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions\/722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}