Synopsis: Exile
Yiloch, the newly crowned Emperor of Lyra, stands accused of arranging the assassination of the Caithin royal family. Torn between love for Yiloch and her close ties with the royal family, Indigo wants nothing more than to prove the accusation false, but the evidence puts the blood of the family on his hands.
Trying to protect the Lyran prince from the swift descent of Caithin justice, Indigo exposes the workings of an enemy who is willing to kill to protect his secrets. In desperation, she unleashes magic that sends Yiloch deep into the desert of Kudan before fleeing for her life. She must find him again to save his life as well as her own.
Betrayed by ally and by love, stranded by uncontrollable magic, Yiloch struggles to make his way back to the Lyran capital before Caithin can declare war, but standing between him and his empire is a lethal new enemy, wielding magic unlike anything his people have faced before.
Q: Hello, Nikki. Can you share with us what sparked the idea for Forbidden Things: Exile? How did it come to fruition?
A: The Making of Forbidden Things…
Exile is the second book in the Forbidden Things series. Oddly enough, the idea for the books was sparked by a dream. In that dream I was Indigo in the prison that she helps Yiloch escape at the beginning of book one. The interesting thing was that, when I woke up from the dream, I knew the main characters, I knew their history, and I knew a lot about what their goals were. I never really expected anything to come of it, but I hadn’t been writing much for some time because I was technical writing for a living and didn’t have a lot of energy to write in front of a computer at the end of the day after doing it all day long. In what I considered an act of self-indulgence simply to get myself writing again, I decided to write the story from that dream. When I started putting it down on paper and fleshing it out, it quickly expanded into three full books. I wrote them all at once (excepting a brief break between one and two to write an unrelated novel that I hope to finish editing one of these days) and loved every minute of the time I got to spend with Indigo, watching her grow and develop into the woman she is by the end of the third book.
The writing was the easy part. After that I edited them all once, then I spent time over the next several years editing book one numerous times to try to get the word count down and liven up some of the text that had taken on a bit of a technical writing lack of style. I also worked on several other books. I never dreamed Indigo’s story would get to the point that it would be loved and accepted by an agent, but that’s what happened. My agent for my debut novel, The Girl and the Clockwork Cat, also accepted Dissident, Forbidden Things book one, and we went through a few more edits on it. After going with a publisher on The Girl and the Clockwork Cat, however, I decided to take Dissident back and try my hand at publishing on my own. I’m thrilled to be releasing Exile into the world now and am planning to publish book three, Apostate, around March of 2016.
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About the Author:
Nikki lives in the magnificent Pacific Northwest with her husband, two horses, two cats, and one slightly crazy dog. She feeds her imagination by sitting on the ocean in her kayak gazing out across the never-ending water or hanging from a rope in a cave, embraced by darkness and the sound of dripping water. She finds peace through practicing iaido or shooting her longbow.
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