Why Did Hunter's Night Take 3 Years? Get the Inside Scoop Now!

Mar 13, 2023

Hey,

I’m Robin, your temporary host, and I promised to explain why my third book (Rogue Ranger) took so long to come out. But first, a few announcements:

Listen to a preview of Rogue Ranger, digitally narrated by Google.
For the next 90 days, anyone who joins Patreon at the Lord/Lady of the Mountain tier or becomes a founding member on Substack will get a digital copy of the boxed Robin of Larkspur: Books 1-3 through BookFunnel 1 month after you sign up as well as all the other benefits that come with it like early access to our books as they are written, peek behind the scenes, and vote on covers.
***This set of three ebooks includes Hunter’s Night, Rogue Night, and Rogue Ranger, but it’s not available in stores.

And now back to what I came here to talk about today. But I’ll let my Scribe, Melinda, explain in her own words. Caution, there are spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk.

Why Did This Book Take Three Years?

by Melinda Kucsera, excerpted from Rogue Ranger

Because I couldn’t figure out how to keep Robin and Shade from killing each other and inciting the forest to kill the victor. The enchanted forest has three rules that were established in Curse Breaker Enchanted:

Start No Fires

Not a problem. They have red lumir crystals that give off more heat than light, so they don’t need fires.

Carry No Weapons

This rule has a bunch of exceptions. Nolo explained in Curse Breaker Enchanted that the enchanted trees react to metal. In short, they don’t like it. Sarn’s magic doesn’t like it either unless the metal object in question is dull and can’t stab him. The enchanted trees don’t have any exceptions for metal, but they also can’t sense metal objects if they’re wrapped in something or stored in a box. Just sheathing your blade won’t work because the hilt is still exposed, and they’ll sense it.

That’s why the Rangers don’t have metal armor. Gregori makes a humorous comment about that when he and Jerlo visit the captain of the guard in Curse Breaker Enchanted.

Do No Harm

This is where the story ran into a problem. Everyone except Sarn and the kids wants to harm everyone else, but that’s not allowed.

Zail wonders if two wrongs make a right, but it’s shown in Curse Breaker Enchanted what happens when one group attacks another and the second group fights back. The forest kills everyone because they all broke the rules.

There’s no rule against using magic in the forest unless the spell harms someone. That’s forbidden and the forest would punish the caster for that. But Sarn isn’t likely to do that, so he doesn’t have any issues crossing the forest.

Rugira says those rules only apply to humans. If that’s true, then fighting a non-human monster wouldn’t break the rules. We’ll have to test that theory in a future book to see what happens and if she told the truth.

Now, do you see why I struggled to finish this book? There was no chance Shade and Robin would get along for long enough to find and save the kids. None. And Sarn was too distracted by his worries about fatherhood and his son to notice any of this. So, as you saw, he did nothing about it unless it threatened the mission.

Sarn was the only character I knew would survive this book because he can shield. When he decides something, he won’t let anything stop him, and he won't break the forest’s rules no matter what happens. He had enough magic to keep his companions from breaking it too until he passed out from overwork, under rest, and too much magic use.

It didn’t take long once he fell unconscious for Shade and Robin to turn on each other. But they both needed to survive without me reaching in and saving them. And I needed some way to get them back on track. But I also needed to deliver a satisfying story to you, and you might have come for the drama, the betrayals, the machinations, the scheming, and lots more magical strings. So I had to turn them loose and let them go after each other since they wouldn’t do anything else.

The hardest part was keeping Sarn from taking over the book. Since it’s not his book and he’s supposed to be a supporting character, not the main one, I couldn’t let him take over. I love writing from his perspective.

But the first five Robin of Larkspur books are prequels for the Curse Breaker Series and they’re supposed to star a mother who’s trying to save her daughter. So Robin had to be the main character, and that brought out a lot of interesting aspects to their shared world that we wouldn’t have seen if this book was from Sarn’s perspective.

I hope you enjoyed seeing the enchanted forest through the eyes of someone who needs maps, trail markers, and other mundane things to travel through it.

***

Get Rogue Ranger, book 3 of the Robin of Larkspur series, now.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with more!