FAQ's for 'The Three Stones of Ebon'

Why not? Just kidding! Both of us have grown up with pets in our lives, mostly dogs and cats. Those who have pets, know what we mean! When one lives with a pet for many months or years, they develop a silent communication with us using a flick of the tail, ears perked this way or that, or sometimes with vocalizations. They all want to be part of our routine and adapt to them. When a person breaks routine or otherwise does not do, say, or provide the expected outcome, it can be slightly or very upsetting to the animal! Lucky was our then-young godson's cat. We got to watch them both grow up together; both were pretty headstrong and independent. So to our minds, having them banter the way they did in the story seemed like a long-overdue conversation for them to have! As for Bootsy, Akira, Alexis and Logan, Pax, Varg, and Quasita, those were cats and dogs that were personally part of our lives. Because we have so very much to share about them, I think those stories are best saved for our blog and newsletter. What wonderful friends they were!

The concept and first draft was all David, since it was intended as a short story and not a full novel! Once the story kept developing, he said, ‘I think I’m going to need help finishing this.’ As it turns out, David is a good storyteller but I have a better flair for language. Together, we’re a dynamic duo. My mother wrote poetry and I believe I get some of my writing flair from her. Once we started working with Strive Publishing and Bookstore out of Minneapolis, we were fortunate to have a collaborative arrangement with us having final say. Having never gone through that process before, it was a challenge to be sure, but also very rewarding. Mary Taris and her team were fantastic to work with!

Both of us would like readers to come away with a sense of wonder, the way our teachers got us to read and planted those seeds of curiosity. ‘The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe’, ‘Harriet the Spy’, ‘The Black Stallion’ are stories that we read a long time ago, but that we carry with us today. I’d like to think that keeping a sense of curiosity about things helps to keep our minds firing in a healthy way!

Jack is heavily based off of our godson from when he was around ten or eleven. The original concept of ‘The Three Stones’ began as a short story David wrote that included Jack as well as Lucky, the cat their family recently adopted. At that particular age, Jack loved dinosaurs, pirates, and his cat so we took some liberties with that in a fantasy realm. No dinosaurs to be found, but we chose monsters from real-world myth and lore such as cyclops and Stronsay, well as some made-up monsters like the Hecti.

David is well into a draft of the sequel to The Three Stones of Ebon. The Adversary of Ebon is the working title. We like it.

The cats and wolves, and most of the human and support characters, were based on real people and animals whom we’ve had the privilege to know and love over the course of our lives.

In short, no. David planned it out to be a short story, not a novel, so there was a lot of world-building and added dimensions needed to link the phases of the journey together.

As part of world-building for Sturgus, we wanted things to feel familiar and somewhat grounding, while also feeling new and a bit off-putting. For that reason, we chose a mix of animals that are familiar to our own world, some completely made-up creatures like the sometimes bipedal Hecti, and drew from Earth mythology and lore with a creature like the Stronsay Beast. The Stronsay Beast in our Earth's mythology has a really cool back-story. Whenever there is a strange, unidentifiable marine animal that washes ashore, it's called a "globster". The most famous globster washed ashore in 1808 on the island of Stronsay in the Orkney Islands, Scotland. Early on, there were efforts to classify it as a new species because it had a gaping jaw, very slender serpent-like body and tiny limbs. Later on, it was found to be a partly-decomposed body of a whale. How's that for a disgusting and cool story?