The Ogre Kingdom has no great halls lined with books, no royal archives where generations of parchment gather dust. The Clans move with the seasons, across mountains and grasslands, following herds, work, and weather. Shelves of books are not much use to a people who are always on the move. So they carry their history with them. The Ogre Loremasters are among the most respected people in the Ogre Kingdom. A Loremaster spends decades training their prodigious memories, learning to hold millions of lines of lore and knowledge and retrieve it with perfect precision. Family trees. Ancient treaties. Laws. Songs. Legends. The deeds of ancestors whose names have been forgotten by everyone else For the Ogres, memory is more than a talent. It is a responsibility. Castles can fall. Treasures can be stolen. Borders can shift. But as long as the Loremasters remember, the Ogre people remember who they are.

I don't much care for Chosen Ones. Not because destiny is uninteresting. Quite the opposite. I find the idea fascinating... and deeply dangerous. The problem is what the Chosen One story can imply: that some people matter more because destiny says they do. That greatness is something bestowed rather than earned. That the rest of us are spectators, waiting for the special person to save the world. I don't believe that. In the Kingdoms, I want heroism to be a choice. I want ordinary people to stand up because they decide something is worth defending. I want courage to belong to anyone. I want knowledge, kindness, stubbornness, loyalty, and sheer bloody-minded determination to matter more than prophecy. Because if there is one thing I believe about stories, and about people, it is this: Nobody needs to be chosen to choose.

If you enjoy brooding, dominant, obsessively possessive heroes, that's perfectly fine. Different readers want different things from fantasy romance. But those particular tropes are not what I'm interested in writing. In the Kingdoms, the man who insists that he knows what is best for a woman, ignores her boundaries, treats jealousy as proof of love, or confuses possession with devotion isn't the romantic hero. He's the villain. The Last Goblin Queen stories are deliberately built around a different idea of romance. My heroines are strong, independent women who don't need to be conquered, rescued, or controlled. They choose partners who respect their judgment, their boundaries, and their freedom. They argue. They challenge each other. They depend on each other. And they remain equals. Because I think healthy relationships are sexy. For me, the fantasy isn't finding a powerful man who can dominate you. It's finding someone powerful enough to stand beside you ...

I love fantasy, but I’ve always wanted to know what happens after the dragon is slain. What do people do when the tyrant falls? How do kingdoms rebuild? What happens when heroes have to raise children, preserve knowledge, repair broken institutions, or simply figure out how to live together? That is the kind of fantasy I want to write. In The Last Goblin Queen , Goblins are not monsters waiting in the darkness. They are scholars, merchants, priests, queens, knights, parents, and children. Heroes fight battles, but they also write books, challenge traditions, fall in love, raise families, and argue about what their society should become. I’m interested in love stories that continue after the wedding, in heroes who remain curious after they have won, and in characters who believe the world can be made better without pretending that doing so is easy. There are dragons, ancient mysteries, magic, and epic adventures here. But ultimately, I’m writing about people, and about the difficult, ho...

The Kingdoms are home to no shortage of creatures that might, at first glance, earn the label "monster." Look closer, though, and something more interesting emerges: not a single one of them is supernatural. They are, every last one, the product of ordinary evolution — shaped, as all living things are, by the pressures of their environment. In the Kingdoms, that environment simply includes six Elements: Fire, Stone, Water, Crystal, Metal, and Void. Bind an animal to one of these across enough generations, and nature does what nature always does. It adapts. Not all of these bound creatures are (necessarily) dangerous, and some have been domesticated. Elementally bound creatures in the Kingdoms  range from Rocktoads (Stonebound toads) to Embermanes (Flamebound horses), from Shadow-wings (Voidbound bats) to Coppercrawlers (Metalbound centipedes). What looks fantastical at first glance is, on closer inspection, just another animal doing what animals do — surviving, brilliantly.

Gada is a Goblin mercenary. Eleanor is an Elvish bard. Both carry the weight of their pasts. Who will say 'I love you' first? "The Last Goblin Queen: Harmony and Resonance" is free on Kindle this week until Saturday. *This Promotion has ended*