I'd been daydreaming about plot ideas, and I came up with the idea for a first meeting between the main characters where they didn't get off to a great start because the woman got scared by the sudden appearance of the man (I won't spoil how the scene goes, because I don't want to spoil the surprise - but it is how Zü and Qiiraa first meet). 

From there, I needed to figure out why they would meet that way, and started weaving together the idea for a story about a woman being forced to live among a primitive tribe (through necessity not through the usual trope of being kidnapped!), where she and one of the warriors are forced to marry - though neither wants to be together. Of course I had to then work out why the man wouldn't initially want a beautiful woman as his bride, so I confess, I went with the easy way out - I killed off his first wife (I know, I know, I did that to poor Liam too!) 

Then I started thinking of who would be his first wife, how people in their culture might decide who marries whom, how she would tragically die and how that would affect him. After jotting down only a few dot point notes, the very first scene I started writing was the "Union fight" scene where Zü and Mel'ica get together, because that point interested and excited me to work out (working out all their rules and how it would form the basis for their marriage system). Yes, I started with the scene that ends up being about the middle of book 2! 

I'm very much a "Pantser" writer - which means that I "fly by the seat of my pants" and usually go into a story with very little idea of what I want to do or where it's going to go, and I like to let the story develop as I write it.  Often it means the story takes me in directions I'd not originally thought of, and I love that process. 

However, after writing the first draft of the Union fight scene and their first love scene, I realised that if I wrote a book where Zü found love, but lost her, it would it be too much of a downer to have her die.  I'd have to kill her off quickly enough to "get to the story" that I originally wanted to tell (the coming together of a native and an offworlder), and I didn't want to have to do that to Mel'ica. 

I realised that I would need to do it as 2 books.  One to tell Zü and Mel'ica's story, and one to tell Zü and Qiira's.  But... how would I do it?  Which order would I tell them?  This took me a lot of contemplating to decide. 

In the end I decided that Zü and Mel'ica's story needed to be told as a prequel.  I wanted to make sure that Mel'ica's death wasn't a surprise to readers, and that her death would be meaningful more than just a way for Zü to have an aversion to getting married again.  I unfortunately needed him to suffer. (Sorry Zü!) I also wanted the reader to get to know Zü as the story went along, slowly discovering what sort of man he is, and why he is the way he is.  So the Zü and Mel'ica story got shelved, with the intention of making it into a followup novella,  and I started working on book #1. 

I found the process of world-building to be a lot of fun, so I'll talk about that in a separate post, but I set to work creating a world for Zü's people and then started writing and let the story take me wherever it led.  It ended up being a lot more involved than I ever expected from my original plan of a simple "outsider woman and hardened warrior are forced to marry against their wills" type story, but I hope that readers will enjoy the journey reading it as much as I did writing it!