I am the Blade

Many years ago, I visited Tintagel castle on the north coast of Cornwall in the UK and could never forget its stark beauty.

Years later, I found myself in Glastonbury and fell in love with the surrounding countryside for all sorts of different reasons. Very shortly after that visit I thought: why not connect the two. Immediately, I saw a small, tough fourteen year old boy battling through a hailstorm as he headed off on a mission whose end was a complete mystery.

Gradually, more characters arrived: the woodcutter, the hogman, then Jenna and Allanza. When I wanted an adult for them to spark off, to my delight a multilingual Greek Jewish merchant appeared on the horizon. And better still, he seemed to have in tow a thuggish English bodyguard called Borth.  Kai turned up, the Stranger took on form and I really knew I was getting somewhere. The idea of compressing the journey into a month, marking its progress with the changing moon and having it end on Easter day was the final piece of the jigsaw.

Part of the fun was basing the locations on real places – as you can see when you look at the map  – but most of it just came from finding out who Tog was, why he was living with a woodcutter, why he could speak Latin and fight like a demon.

Above all, I just knew I wanted to explore a world where everything was changing, weather was something you felt, landscape was something you had to struggle with and every decision you made could mean the difference between life and death.