Believe it or not, the concept for Cynthia and Constantine, my new release from the Wild Rose press, sprang up during a season of American Idol.   

I work for county government and we have several satellite offices around the county.  Once a month seven of us get together to have lunch.  We call it the Lusty Ladies Lunch Group.  Other times we keep in touch via email. 

During this particular season, Bo Bice and Constantine Maroulis were competing.  Two of the Lusties choose these guys as their favorites.  While we didn’t agree on who should win that season, we did all agree that they had ‘romance book cover’ hair; the long and flowing kind of hair usually depicted on Knights in Shinning Armor on historical romances. 

After one particularly hot and heavy day of emailing (after our constituents were served, of course) I went home and wrote a small piece about a knight meeting his ladylove.  The next day I sent it off to the Lusties and got requests for more.  Well one thing lead to another and I began to serialize a story about Bo and Constantine as knights in the Arthurian days.    I named my hero Constantine and his lady was Cynthia, one of the Lusties.  I gave Sir Constantine a brother, Sir Braeden and named his lady, Jane, another Lustie.   

The story just evolved on a weekly basis with email scenes going back and forth until I had 100 pages.   

I thought that was the end of the adventure until I decided to flesh out Constantine and Cynthia’s story and turn it into a 55,000-word book.  I was fortunate enough to have the Wild Rose Press expressed interest in the novel and then publish it. 

And yes, you’ll either love this or hate this, but the antagonist of the story is named after one of the American Idol Judges.  I’m sure you can guess which. 

There will be a sequel to this book called Jane and Braeden because in the course of fleshing out the story so it would be long enough for a book, Jane’s character became an integral part of the story and now we need to hear her story also. 

The moral of this story is that you never know when or where inspiration is going to sneak up and bop you on the side of your head.    In my case it was with a microphone on Fox-TV.