Willing Sacrifice

Author Essay

Dear reader,

I’m a planner. Always have been. When I went about writing the Sentinel Wars, I created tons of lists, spreadsheets and charts to help me track characters, magical powers and plotlines. I spent a couple of years tweaking the world to my liking, and even wrote one book that I scrapped entirely because it just didn’t start the series with the overall feel I wanted to achieve. Before I so much as sat down to write book one of the series, I already knew how the last book would end, even though I planned for the series to be about twelve to fifteen books long. That’s just the way the mind of a planner like me works.

Because of that mental defect, I’ve known what was going to happen in my latest release, Willing Sacrifice, for years. I’ve been anticipating writing it all this time, and I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to finally have this particular story on paper, ready to share with you.

I knew from the moment I created Torr that he was going to have a rough road—that I was going to torture him to the point of breaking before I gave him his happily ever after. I knew that I was going to strip away from him everything he held dear and force him to persevere so that he would be worthy of the prize I had in store for him. The kind of suffering Torr and Grace have gone through for several books demanded something special, which is what I’ve strived to give them.

If you were to ask any of the characters in the Sentinels world, they’d tell you that Grace and Torr are two people who were never meant to be together. And they’d be right. They’re from different worlds, different species. She’s an average human woman. He’s a powerful, immortal warrior whose honor demands that he find a woman of his own kind to strengthen him and allow him to fulfil his vows to protect humans. To commit his life to Grace and deny his destiny is practically the same thing as breaking his vows. Still, he’s driven by a love so strong, it can’t be denied, no matter what obstacles, rules or boundaries he faces.

This book is a bit different from the other installments of the Sentinel Wars. It leans heavily on my love of the fantasy and sci-fi books I grew up reading. It’s still definitely a romance, but there are aspects of it that veer away from the usual flavor of the series. I don’t want to spoil anything, but by the end of chapter one, readers will know exactly what I mean.

While I have strayed from some of the things a reader might typically expect of an installment of the Sentinel Wars, what I haven’t done is compromise the heart of the series. This story, like all the others, is about real love—the kind that endures no matter what, the kind that refuses to give up even when things become difficult, the kind that runs deeper than chemistry or circumstance, all the way down to one’s soul. It’s about the kind of love that makes a person willing to give up everything just to know that the one they love is safe and happy, even if that means giving up their own happiness and safety. Even if that person never knows the kind of sacrifice that was made for them. It’s this kind of love that keeps the world of the Sentinels spinning and gives them hope to continue on when things seem impossible.

It’s taken me years to build up to this story, but I hope you find WILLING SACRIFICE worth the wait.

Happy reading!

Shannon K. Butcher