Some Books Wait Until You’re Ready for Them

The story behind The Wooden Ring

For the past several weeks, I’ve been writing about the practical business of bringing a self-published book into the world – covers, uploads, launch plans, and initial marketing. My upcoming release The Wooden Ring has been the case study quietly lurking behind much of it.

But with publication less than two weeks away, it seems like a good time to pause talking about how the book is being published and tell you why it exists.

Some books arrive quickly. Others wait until you are ready for them.

The Missing Part of Cordelia’s Story

The Wooden Ring began fourteen years ago with a question about King Lear.

In Act I of Shakespeare’s play, King Lear decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. The two eldest compete to flatter him. Cordelia, the youngest, refuses to turn her love into a performance, and Lear banishes her.

When Cordelia reappears in Act IV, she’s married to the King of France and has returned at the head of an army.

Shakespeare had other matters to attend to. My imagination refused to leave that gap alone.

What happened to Cordelia between banishment and return? What did exile do to her? How did the discarded daughter become a woman capable of coming home with an army behind her?

And, because this was my imagination, what if there were magic (witches!)? And pirates (why not)? And a runaway prince (kinda hunky!)?

The Book That Waited

That first version of the novel was called The Witches of Venik. It found a literary agent but sadly failed to find a publisher. Eventually, I dropped it into my hard drive and moved on to other books.

I thought I was done with it.

But it nagged at me.

Earlier this year, I resurrected the manuscript. Coriandra was still there. The story still had a pulse. But I wasn’t the writer who had put it away fourteen years earlier, and the book couldn’t be simply dusted off and sent into the world.

So I took it apart and rebuilt it.

The political story grew deeper. The consequences became sharper. Cori’s journey became more fully her own. What had begun as curiosity about a missing piece of Cordelia’s life became a story about legitimacy, duty, power, and the difference between possessing a crown and deserving one.

The Young Woman Already Doing the Work

Coriandra is not the obvious future queen of anything.

She has no conventional magic in a ruling family defined by it, no recognised claim to the throne, and no illusions about her family. While her father gambles and her sisters chase power, Cori balances the accounts, notices the missing rents, and quietly tries to keep the kingdom of Venik from collapsing beneath its jewels.

Then her father divides the realm between her sisters and sends Cori across the sea as payment for the money he needs to save what remains of Venik.

She begins the novel with every external measure of importance stripped away: title, home, family, safety, and even the limited authority she once exercised behind the scenes. Yet she’s already been doing the work that ruling actually requires. She pays attention. She sees what others prefer not to see. She understands that decisions have consequences for people beyond the palace walls.

The central question was no longer simply what happened to Cordelia. It became: what makes someone worthy to rule?

Is it birth? Magic? A jewelled crown? The ability to make other people obey? Or is it judgment, courage, responsibility, and the willingness to care for something larger than yourself?

Why a Wooden Ring?

In Venik, every ruler receives a wooden ring at the coronation. It symbolises the union of the ruler with Mischieviosa, the kingdom’s goddess, and with the land itself. The land and the ruler are one. Caring for it is the ruler’s most sacred trust.

The ring is deliberately plain. A crown can display wealth and status. The wooden ring represents obligation.

That distinction became the heart of the book. Power may be inherited, seized, purchased, or performed. Legitimacy has to be earned in the way power is used.

Inspired by King Lear – Then Off on Its Own

I sometimes describe The Wooden Ring as King Lear with magic and pirates, because it’s true and it makes me laugh. It’s also incomplete.

You don’t need to know the play to enter this story. King Lear provided the first question, not the map. Once Cori leaves Venik, the novel sails into a world of witches and warlocks, losu familiars, pirates, old goddesses, buried histories, political bargains, and uncomfortable truths about the people she has been taught to fear.

At its most personal, The Wooden Ring is about who gets to decide who you are. Cori has spent her life being measured by a system that has already found her wanting. Her journey is not only towards power. It is from seeking permission to belong towards knowing that she already does.

Fourteen years ago, I could write the first version of that story. I’m not sure I could have written this one.

Perhaps that’s why some books wait.

The Wooden Ring publishes September 15. If you’d like to meet Coriandra before then, you can read the first two chapters free.

READ THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS FREE