How I met the Realm Jumper Characters

Anyone who knows me can tell you I am a Lord of the Rings junkie. I have writer’s block, I watch the Lord of the Rings. I need more inspiration. I watch Lord of the Rings. I need to get my characters talking again… well you get it. If truth be told, I have the Lord of the Rings to thank for my fantasy series.

I am asked a lot how I came up with my series and it truly is from watching Lord of the Rings. Have you ever read a book or watched a movie and wonder things? Happens to me every time I watch the movies. The biggest question I had was this: “What happened to the souls of the Elves and other species who died on Earth. If their species left Middle Earth, did the souls of the dead follow or were they tied forever to the realm they died in?”

The more I thought on that particular question, the more questions arose. It was during a time of such wonderings I met Elwyndyn. Elwyndyn is a Moon Elf and a Realm Jumper. He lived on Earth during the time of the Elves and returned to his homeworld. On a day when my focus was strongly on the questions I had, he came to me with a story. He said, “Let me tell you what happens to the souls of the Elves who died on Earth.”

So I sat down to write what he told me. As I was doing so, I was introduced to Valael, the Elf-Witch of the second book. She whispered, “Please write my story next.” Well, as she showed me bits and pieces of her story, I was intrigued, so promised to do so.

Never having written fiction before, I had a lot of starts and stops writing the story Elwyndyn told me. He was not very forthcoming at first, feeding me bits here and there. Needless to say, I watched the Lord of the Rings movies many times during the year it took me to write Elven-Jumper. But finally, he opened up more, and I got the story down. Let me tell you, Elves feel deeply, they just don’t show it. They are very stoic and you rarely get a glimpse of what they are truly feeling, unlike humans whose emotions are very close to the surface and break out quite freely.

Anyway, back to Elwyndyn’s story. What evolved from it was a look at an Elven soul, trapped in a human body. The soul became tied to Earth during its death and had been reincarnating as a human since. But after a while, the human with the Elven soul started having memories, which drew the Elves to the human world once more.

My plan with the series was to meet the different humans with Elven souls in each book and see their struggles they went through dealing with the memories and ending with whatever option they chose. However, you know the saying about best laid plan.

In the course of writing Elven-Jumper, Dark Elves suddenly appeared, and I was like, “What the hell? Where did you come from?” Needless to say, Dark Elves have no trouble showing anger, hate, greed, etc. They pushed their way into the series, changing it and I had a major antagonist bent on creating havoc. Which of course set up quite a bit of peril for the human carrying Valael’s soul, when it came time to write her story.

But the changes to my series plans didn’t stop there. A Dragon-Shifter who made a brief appearance in Elven-Jumper, became a central focus of Elf-Witch, along with the human carrying Valael’s soul. The plans I had for Valael change drastically and I was left scrambling to re-plot the series.

As I wrote Elf-Witch, more and more characters came forward until I was left with a chaotic swirl of voices in my head, screaming to be heard. What was supposed to be about Elves and humans evolved to include Dragon-Shifters, Phoenix-Shifters, Dwarves, Guardians, and a whole slew of other species, leading to a fantasy world where chaos reigns supreme.

Writing the Realm Jumper Chronicles was one wild, chaotic ride that reached its exciting conclusion in Elven Blood Oath. Even though this series is complete, fear not, there are many more stories published or in the works that feature characters from this original series. There’s always something going on in the Mystic Realms.

Until next time…

Raven