Happily Flarey…Ever?

The third and final Marion Flarey book is now out!

Here’s the teaser:

Happily Flarey...Ever? by Kirsten Mortensen
She’s lost two princes. Is number three the charm?

She’s lost two princes. Is number three the charm?

In life, as in fairy tales, things happen in threes.

So when Marion Flarey’s third prince comes back into her life, it seems like a dream come true. He’s a fairy tale expert! He’s discovered a previously-unknown treasure trove of stories! He wants Marion’s help writing his next book!

Has Marion finally found her happily ever after?

Or maybe she still needs to learn an important lesson about the tales she loves so much…

It’s available on Amazon for Kindle or print.

Or click here to get a copy for different brands of e-reader (Kobo, Nook, Apple, etc.) here.

So what do I have to say about the novel, now that it’s out?

A few things.

One of the 2022 projects that lured me away from writing. Silly hens!
  1. It seemed like it took forever to get the series to this point. But in retrospect, I started working on the book in the summer of 2019, so it was “only” a little over three years. So: one book a year.
  2. My pace would have been faster if we hadn’t moved in 2021. Lived out of a tent for 9 months while we built a new house. Then all the new-house projects.
  3. In theory I could have been writing solidly that whole time, but in practice, novels take up a LOT of my headspace when I’m working on them. And it’s really hard to pick them up and put them back down again. When I’m writing, I’ve got one foot in another world, and it slows me down considerably when I have to play the hokey pokey. Left foot in, left foot out, argh!
  4. My pace wasn’t fast, but it also wasn’t awful. And I’ve accepted that this is how I write. I take a long time, because…
  5. I write from the inside out. I start with a gist of an idea: main characters, setting, a few major plot points. The characters then become the foundation, and I start working the novel out by working out what they do and how they react to one another.
  6. I don’t think I’ll ever do a series again. I disliked having such a big project hanging over me. I felt like I had to get it to completion even though I really wanted to work on other things.
  7. I’m super excited about moving to another project. The working title is Scratch, and it’s going to be very different from the Marion Flarey books. Darker. And definitely more literary.

And that’s it, for now. Please let me know if you enjoy the book.

It started with her name & nickname. (I love using notebooks this way. “Journaling” about my novel ideas really works for me.)