About the Book…

My strategic advisors told me that I needed to add an ‘about the book’ button to this web page. Apparently the story behind the story can be helpful and interesting to the potential reader and, well, I sometimes like being helpful, so here I go…

‘A Kingdom’s Tale’ was meant to be a musical not a novel, actually. And it is still intended to be one. The inspiration for it came as a result of several things, the first of which is my life-long experience with the monster of ‘Cool’ and it’s often paralyzing and gruesome affects on either myself or those around me. ‘Cool’ is not just about fashion, popular music or the latest television obsession. It is a dilemma of identity which is a hard thing to work with at the best of times particularly for kids. I have spent many years observing and experiencing the negative power of ‘Cool’, which is why I was very excited at finding a brilliant section in a book called ‘Searching for God Knows What’,  that unexpectedly helped in undoing the mystery of it for me in a wonderfully simple way.

The second ingredient in the story behind the story  was my younger brother’s involvement in many musicals throughout his high school days. Along with the rest of my family I attended his shows many times over and I was repeatedly impacted by the power of the stories told in a musical form and at some point I realised that I’d love to write one of my own!

So I decided to wait for an idea to strike me. After trying to come up with a story purely out of my head (which ended up in a very bad headache) I discovered that creativity truly doesn’t just come from the mind, but from the heart. Amazingly, it was in the short days that followed that I stumbled across Don Miller’s book and I found myself stirred by the ideas he was writing about . Then a thought came to me, ‘Why not turn the concepts he’s talking about into a fictional story and make it into a musical?’

So I did. Grabbing the reins (of my pen) I tried to control the multitude of ideas that whirled inside me and charged into forty-five minutes of intense scribbling at the end of which I had the blue-print of a two act, twenty–four scene musical.

Time soon came to begin writing the script… and I was clueless. With nothing to go on I realised that a book version might be a good idea, as it would iron-out areas of the plot and give me some dialogue to possibly work with also.  After doing a short, two-month course in creative writing I set to work and finished the first draft of the tale one year later, writing just fifteen minutes a day. It took another year to edit it and have a short-run printed through an independent publisher. These first copies sold well and several months later I was told by a book chain that they would trail my book in their two Brisbane stores. So I went to work refining the story and have just completed a much larger print-run ready for the next phase in the adventure.

Writing the story has done a great deal for me personally and I truly hope it will also be life-giving for others. So, if you decide to grab a copy, I really hope you enjoy it!

Guy Valiant