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Now, we knew that if we wrote a series of short stories, no publisher would want it. Anthologies rarely sell that well. And we didn't any of us particularly like the idea, because being novelists, we're all used to being allowed to spread ourselves on the page, and restrictions are hard to live with. So we hit on the idea of a set of five or six novellas, each of them 25,000 words, to build up to a coherent story. We were convinced that there had to be a consistent strand running through all the novellas to justify the book. For our first book we chose the common theme of a cursed relic, a piece of the True Cross which had been cursed when it was stolen from a church, and which has subsequently been passed on through time with disastrous results. This allowed us to write sections of the book for our main characters, all in their own centuries, as the relic passes from one hand to another.

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David Meadows wrote:

I don't want to go into specific details, so let's put it like this..... my royalty cheque was enough to pay for the meal celebrating my first royalty cheque

Was it worth it? Yes, absolutely. My mother has a book on her shelf with my story inside it

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