There are so many cool things about being an author. You get to enjoy the beauty of seeing a passion and a career come together. You get the privilege of working with incredibly talented people in the publishing industry. And when people ask what you do, you get to say “I’m an author” and experience the brief endorphin rush that follows. :)

Best of all, you get to watch your stories brought to life and put into the hands of people who love to read. Sometimes, they end up caring as much about your worlds and characters as you do.

I’ve been so honored to received e-mails and messages from people who wanted to tell me how much they loved Gambit. I smile (and am often moved to tears) when readers reach out like that. It’s truly a blessing. A few have asked for author interviews, which are a lot of fun. I’ve also been asked for more details about prodigies, the Outlying Lands, the book's title, and how characters got their names.

So I thought it would be fun to post some trivia out here in the upcoming months. Some of it will be about the first book, some about the sequel (which I’m knee-deep in right now), and some about the world of prodigies in general.

To start, here are a few fun facts about Gambit:

• The idea to write Gambit came while watching an episode of Alphas on the Syfy channel; that idea connected with the Mayan prediction for the end of the world on 12/21/12, along with an article I'd recently read about the effects of a global economic collapse.
• It was totally unplanned. My brain was like "hey, here's an idea...and another one, and another one...this could be fun...annnnnd GO."
• I wrote ten pages the first day, and seventy pages the first week. To date, that's the most progress I've ever made in my writing.
• I wrote it for fun and mostly as a distraction from a different novel I'd been working on (one I called "Wolfe" at the time). I didn't take Gambit seriously as a novel until I sent some of it to my Wolfe beta-reader, Sarah, for her opinion. She liked it so much that I decided to go ahead and finish it.
• The dish-washing scene with Willow and China was written in because my son, Caleb, wanted the kitten to make another appearance. He also thought Willow would have hairy legs after traveling for three days through the desert scrub, so I added all the shaving references to make him feel better. :)
• This story consumed me as I wrote it. I even edited in my sleep. Waking up at 2 AM rewriting sentences in my head was a common—and annoying—occurrence.
• I set Gambit in the United Kingdom because so many sci-fi adventures are centered in America. Superheroes, alien invasions, and natural disasters alway seem to wind up in New York, Chicago, L.A., etc. I wanted Gambit's focus to be outside of the U.S.
• The first draft was simply called "Willow" and was a whopping 130,000 words long! By the time I sent it to REUTS, the title had become "Prodigy" and I'd cut off the last 30,000 words to make it shorter.
• We decided to change the title of the book because Marie Lu had just published a novel with the same name. A lot of game terminology was tossed around. "Gambit" appealed to me the most because of the sacrifice/game reference and also because it's a nod to the X-Men (one of my favorite sci-fi franchises).
• My editor had me add back almost all of the 30,000 words I'd cut off. :)
• Every element on the cover has meaning--the butterfly with tiger-striped wings, the dagger, the drop of blood. I love how beautifully the cover ties into the story.
• We edited the entire book in 4-5 days (including part of the release day). Because of this, I now firmly believe my editor has superpowers.

So those are a few things you may or may not have known about Gambit. Hope you find it interesting, or amusing, or both. More to come in the days ahead!

Image Credit: Author