The Genesis of Adelheid – Mia Darien

Welcome to my guest, Mia Darien, who reveals her lengthy fascination with the preternatural and the road that lead to her two novels.

The dedication to “Cameron’s Law” thanks all of those who walked the long road to life that Adelheid took, and it has been a long road. Some authors have an idea and can type out their stories to perfection inside of a few months. For others, it takes more work. For me and the Adelheid series, it’s been more than ten years in the making. Here’s a look at where and how it started, and where it’s ended up.

You could say that an examination of the Adelheid series is to look at the evolution of a story and an idea.

When I was younger, I read the first three Anne Rice vampire stories, I devoured the Vampire Files by P. N. Elrod (and still count her among my favorite authors) and I loved the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton. Of course, I fell off the wagon on the Blake series when she went round a bend I didn’t like (sometime around Cerulean Sins and Micah, can’t remember exactly now) but she was a strong influence. I also loved Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta, Janet Evanovich and Stephanie Plum, and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. (Again, all of them lost me later on in the series but I inhaled their earlier books.)

So, it was really no surprise when – at sixteen – I decided to write “This Shade of Night”. I believe I was ultimately inspired by Anita Blake and the idea of preternatural legality, though I thought at the time that she was missing a lot of marks she could have been hitting with it. So, I did what many authors do and decided to fix what I didn’t like, so I wrote my own story.  At sixteen, what do we really know, though?

I started the series in Salem, Massachusetts though I don’t live there. (Visited several times, having grown up two hours away.) I made Sadie an investigator for an agency called Preternatural, Unlimited. She was half vampire, half were-tiger. It was set in 2018, fifteen years after the law. I mangled a half dozen bits of lore into the story because I thought they were cool, as well as the mystery and romance.

I even self-published through iUniverse almost ten years ago. And believe it or not, it met with a decent reception from a magazine reviewer. Of course, that magazine was a trade publication now gone defunct, but still, the story had potential. I wrote two more books in the series, one featuring Dakota the theriomorph hunter and the third back to Sadie. These never went further than friends and family.

Life caught up with me. Marriage, divorce, marriage, changing jobs, changing houses, having a child… You get the idea. I stopped writing for a while and didn’t pick it up again, for good, until the past couple of years. I had to return to my roots, but this time, I was going to do it right. I decided that more needed to go into it.

I decided to create a new town. I gave it a history. I created a private listing of the location, the businesses, the population, who founded it, and so on. I researched the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and modeled the path of the Preternatural Rights Act of 2010 after it, calling it Cameron’s Law after the Harvard law student and werewolf (Cameron St John) who pioneered it. I gave the law a history. I moved it all to our timeline to achieve the affect on the setting I had always intended but didn’t make as much sense before.

I brainstormed with a biologist friend to come up with preternatural biology, and chose what lore I’d use. I wrote a guide to the preternatural, which is at the end of every story.

I made Sadie the owner of the agency, because she had always been the “anchor” character. I gave her history with Cameron St John, and more about her efforts in bringing the law into being. I put Cameron’s sister Madison as the agency’s secretary and Sadie’s best friend to anchor that history. I made her all vampire, because the half-breed thing just seemed silly. I re-plotted and rewrote, taking elements of the previous drafts but streamlining, tweaking, and making it work better.

“Cameron’s Law” – as a book – was born and, I have to say, to generally good response and now the second book, “When Forever Died,” is also out. This one kept a lot from its original version, as Dakota hasn’t changed much, but so far so good there too.

Just like a writer, a story can mature. I might have had an okay, or even a good, story when it started but once it had matured and grown along with me, it’s become a better story. And it only took twelve years to do it!