About
About Rosamund Ring
I live in Scotland with my family; when I’m not working or writing I like to be outdoors in the countryside or in my garden, or chatting in cafes with my friends. I love dark chocolate and coffee, and my guilty pleasure is Star Trek.
The plot for this story was devised in the early 2000s, so any resemblance to current events can be considered a case of life imitating art.
The story of the story
Princess Teressa arrived in my head when I was thirteen and gobbling up fantasy books as fast as they were written. I had started, aged ten, with the original and the best, the Lord of the Rings, and it had blown me away.
In those days there was no such thing as YA or teen fiction, so I was into the adult stuff straight away, much of which I couldn’t make head or tail of. I soon decided I could do better, so I spent my teens writing a high fantasy epic alongside school and exams, featuring Princess Teressa galloping her white horse and waving her sword around to save the world.
By the time I left school, I had grown up enough to realise that it wasn’t very good, so it was put into a drawer, and years of medical training and exams took over.
Much later, I began to wonder how the swashbuckling heroine of an epic fantasy story would really feel, inside her head: would she be a woman like us, with our hopes, dreams and priorities, and making the same mistakes?
How would the fairytale unfold in the real world, without magic or prophecies, dragons or unicorns, but with the same complicated people and power struggles?
I picked up Teressa’s story again in my late twenties, and began to re-write it in a world much the same as our own, although I soon found that my fictional world needed a medieval system of absolute monarchies and arranged marriages to accommodate the fairytale plot. You’ll have to suspend disbelief enough to accept a modern world with such an unenlightened system of government.
Writing this story has been my hobby for many years since then. I’d work enthusiastically at a draft for a few months, and then family life and a medical career would move to the foreground again and the story would be put away for a few more years.
Finally, completing another draft in February 2022, I knew it was as finished as it would ever be: I had no more redrafts in me. At this point, it was time to decide whether to put it away in a drawer for ever, or to make it available to anybody who might enjoy reading it.