When I start writing a book it is always about statistics, character sheets, background details and a lot of other boring stuff that just needs to be there to ensure a smooth and consistent storyline. But the real story begins way before that. In the case of the “Lucas Trent” series it all started when I got annoyed with the things I was reading at the time. I love details and I particularly like to dive into those when I read a book. Unfortunately with all the books I had so far that was not a good idea. With all of them, even the very famous bestsellers, the thing starts to look 
shaky when you dive deep. Things stop making sense, characters start veering off in directions that is not like what they are supposed to be and storylines just take tight turns to stay alive. So at some point I set myself the challenge of making it better. Writing a complex story without taking desperate moves to keep it together. And it all started with the world itself. It’s easy to write in a fictional world, as you can redefine everything just to your liking. That’s why I put my fantasy story into the real world. Granted, this “world” is a mixture of my home country, the country the story is set in and some others around the globe, but it is all out of the real world. My heroes don’t have a magical village to retreat to, no parallel universe to hide in, not even a costume to hide under… And that’s what inspired me…
Making fantasy work in the real world.
Now, when it comes to “Grand Theft Magic”, which is the third part in the series, the inspiration was one that I was interested in from the very beginning: The clash between the fantasy side of the story and things that are not part of it. This book is taking the masquerade to the next level, and it’s only getting upwards from there…
Talking about publishing a little…
As a not-exactly-best-selling author it is impossible to get a descent publisher to take you on. And even if they do, the contracts you get are just no good. It’s my work, I like to stay in control to the very end, so my choice of doing self-publishing was pretty obvious. For the first two books I went the more-or-less-self-publishing approach, meaning that even though everyone calls it “self-publishing“ those books were published by a professional company, in my case AuthorHouse. Well, that experience was not exactly what I had hoped for… So this time I did self-publishing for real… Got my own ISBNs, my own cover designer, my own editor, etc… I am still using a logistics partner, but whatever I could do myself, I did do myself this time. And let me tell you: It was a lot of work, by far more than I had anticipated, but I wouldn’t have it any other way from now on…
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Publishing under a pen name to keep his personal life separate from his writing life, Richard Blunt was raised in the heart of Europe, in a nation where English is not the native language. Like his heroes, Richard blunt is nothing more than a shadow – a specter that whispers a story for everyone to hear.
His latest book is Lucas Trent 3: Grand Theft Magic.
You can visit his website at http://www.lucastrent.com/ and his blog at http://richardblunt.blogspot.com/.
The Story Behind the Book 