Morgan’s Knot evolved from an unfulfilled yearning to resume earnest writing, neglected but never abandoned during thirty-five years of an award-winning career as an advertising and architectural photographer, advocate, volunteer, and educator. (For a peek at my portfolio, please visit: www.rickstiller.biz).
I decided to publish this series under my full name (I’m Rick to friends and family) to honor my father, an internationally renowned Scottish biochemist and scholar with an expansive Victorian education, who read and retained everything. When I was a wee tike, he would take me on his knee at bedtime and begin a story - filled with young heroes, magical creatures, fantastic settings, and wicked conniving adults - that might go on for days or weeks before the children finally triumphed over the villains…and then he’d start another.
Before the first sentence of the first book appeared on the screen, I spent months pondering potential plots, characters, themes, and challenges. I considered all the things that I hold dear in life, rummaged through a tangle of intriguing concepts, myths, and legends, revisited many of the books I treasured in my youth…and struggled to recall the gist of the tales spawned in my father’s inventive imagination.
Once the actual writing commenced, I’d sneak an hour before heading home from the studio and more after dinner, until the process morphed into habit and these characters became part of my consciousness. There have been many points in this process where I thought I knew where the story was going, only to be interrupted by one of the characters saying, in perfect voice, “I wouldn’t say that!” or “You’re thinking like a grown-up again!” or “There’s something vital and obvious that you’ve completely missed.”
Along the way, I found great respect and admiration for their dedication to ‘all that’s right and true’ as well as their patient persistence and relentless pluck in foiling insurmountable adversity. Would that we all possessed character and determination worthy of such veneration.