.webp)
People often ask me where Threads of Fate began. The truthful answer is…I don’t actually know. I say that because it’s not that I can’t remember sitting down to write the first chapter –– I absolutely can. It’s purely because I don’t think stories begin on the day you type the first sentence. I suspect this flagship series of my own empire has been quietly forming over my entire life.
Like many fantasy readers, I loved nothing more than disappearing into worlds far bigger than my own. Lord of the Rings. Throne of Glass. Game of Thrones. Dune. Every book left its DNA behind in my consciousness. Not characters to imitate, or plots to borrow –– but a growing fascination with world-building, power, politics, and the impossible choices characters are forced into within those stories.
At one point after finishing an incredible series, I remember saying to my best friend, almost in passing, “One day, I’d like to write a book.” At the time, it felt like one of those impossible ambitions people quietly keep to themselves.
Then, the world changed.
Or perhaps, I did…
I grew incredibly tired.
And entirely furious.
For almost twenty years, I’d built a career I was incredibly proud of. Working inside the prestige of financial services in The City in London –– helping to run some of the world's largest and most complex systems. Watching politics unfold from a professional distance. Asking not just what was happening, but why. Large investment banks. Hedge funds. Custodians. Looking at rules and regulations. Incentives. Governance. Facilitating deals. Asking where pressure points existed, and what happened when institutions began to fail. All while living as a spouse in the military world which is incredibly beautiful to those looking in from the outside, yet also utterly ruthless.
As the political climate became increasingly hostile and polarised. I watched in frank astonishment at just how quickly fear and division became political currency. I found myself watching the news every morning, with a growing sense of disgust.
Women’s rights became political bargaining chips.
People met stories of blatant abuse and systematic degradation with ridicule.
Public discourse grew more hostile.
Those with disabilities and neurodiversity became targets.
The manosphere exploded into the mainstream, teaching young men that empathy was weakness and domination was strength, while I was raising four young boys.
For the first time, I was no longer analysing the vast systems of our own world as an academic exercise. I was asking what kind of world my sons were growing up in. What kind of world I was living in…
That was the moment I stopped looking at events individually, and started looking underneath the hood.
Power.
Fear.
Propaganda.
Religious extremism.
The narratives societies tell themselves to justify cruelty.
That’s where Threads of Fate officially began to form. I wanted to understand how ordinary people become participants in extraordinary injustice. How good people convince themselves they are doing the right thing when they stand by and do nothing, in the face of rampant radicalisation of huge sections of the public. How an empire can believe itself righteous, while slowly undermining the citizens who comprise it.
I found myself asking difficult questions which harkened me back to days studying philosophy at undergraduate level.
Who decides what is acceptable in society?
Who benefits from fear?
How do ordinary people become complicit in systems they would never have built themselves?
What happens when obedience becomes a virtue, and questioning becomes heresy?
I didn’t realise it at the time…but I wasn’t simply seeking to dismantle the world around me. I was laying the foundations of the Empire of Eternal Dawn.
Eventually, I found myself on long-term sick leave from work. People often imagine that illness gives you endless time. It doesn’t…
Some days, I wrote.
Many days, I couldn’t.
For weeks on end, the manuscript barely moved at all while I was managing my own health. And that still continues to this very day.
Threads of Fate wasn’t written in a glorious burst of inspiration. It certainly wasn’t written in a few months. It was written slowly. Painfully. Around the realities of life while recovering from a serious illness.
Yet, something unexpected happened. Without even consciously deciding I was trying to “become an author”, the story simply kept growing. The more I wrote, the more I realised I wasn’t inventing a world from scratch –– I was discovering one. The Empire of Eternal Dawn. The Veil. Aria and Evander. They hadn’t appeared overnight. They were born out of the realities of our own times, then thrust into a fantasy world where I could examine all these questions as the story unfolded around them.
Looking back, I think my mind had been collecting fragments for years, before I ever opened a blank document. Reading across genres. Watching blockbuster films and shows. Absorbing the details of what makes a great story. Then, one ordinary morning I woke up and finally had somewhere to put them.
The first draft wasn’t perfect — far from it. I was grappling with writing an epic fantasy world while throwing out “the rulebook”. I was writing for women who were tired of compromising. Who wanted romance and fantasy world-building that was accessible. Prose that was lyrical and elevated, yet not pretentious. Who wanted political stakes that matter. Where not everything turned out with a happily ever after. A world where sometimes, the villains might triumph. Where good people die. I was writing the mirror — not an escape.
The entire process continuously surprised me. Characters refused to behave. Entire scenes appeared I had never planned. My beta readers had opinions. My wonderful editor gave me permission to lean in harder. And I listened.
Somewhere, between that first page and the last…I realised this was no longer simply a book. It was the beginning of a world I wanted to spend years exploring.
Today, Threads of Fate is planned as an epic saga spanning rebellions, kingdoms, ancient races and forgotten gods. That sounds wonderfully organised. Though, the truth is considerably less glamorous.
It all started with a single blank page…along with my decision to pursue this, and see what happens next.
