The Bookminder!

The Traditional Holiday Push Karilyn Bentley’s Book Release Post

The Bookminder!

How did you come up with the concept of your story?

In 2004 I had a very vivid dream that, afterward, wouldn’t leave me alone. Said dream basically detailed out one scene

from the story, something so different and captivating for me that it stuck. Now, it must be noted that I was not writing at

that time, nor did I intend to write in any professional capacity. But as this one nugget of an idea would not let me be, I

started to form a story around it – Why were these people doing what they were doing? Who were they?

I think that working in the Preservation Dept of the campus library system had bled into my subconscious and that is

where the magick system that rules The Bookminder developed.

How did you come up with the title?

Haha, well, I had to actually do a bit of research to check my brain on this as, over time, there have been several

incarnations, besides the working title of Wizard’s Librarian. As a (former(?)) librarian, I was really hoping to keep the

working title, as homage to my career and the work that had sparked the initial idea. But then we wanted to go with

something simpler, brighter, and more “fantasy”.

The ‘research’ I allude to above? I just unearthed a Facebook exchange between a librarian friend and I from last March.

In it she says she quite likes the new title and then asks “Who came up with that?”

My answer? “Honestly I don’t remember . . . might have been my editor. We just started throwing things together.” Words

that felt book-binder-y but not quite so literal. Things like “Spellbinder / Spellbound” seemed a bit too on the nose. bookminderfull

Please provide some insight into or a secret or two about your story.

The locations in Bookminder are real. Parentino truly did fall to ruins, while its twin fortification flourished. And while the

town known as Dvigrad in the story did have another name, Moncastello, in keeping with the attitude of the characters in

the story, I dropped the name from their fortification and merely called it Dvigrad. Call it a decision of character politics, if

you will.

The tales of what actually happened to Dvigrad are a little muddled but history has the town mixed up in the middle of the

Venice and Austrian conflict of the sixteenth century. And the town truly was abandoned due to plague—though history

has that date at 1630 and Bookminder has it coming some 50-odd years later.

What was the most surprising part of writing this book?

The more I write (and this is, by far, the most writing I have yet done) the more I have come to realize that stories like to

take on a life of their own. I used to hear that and scoff. But, in penning Bookminder, I found that sometimes an element

would sneak into the narrative and then prove to be a stroke of brilliance in how it either foreshadowed a thing, or simply

played a symbolic role. I kept looking at how things turned out going “but I’m not that smart!” or maybe “I’ve gotta just be

lucky . . .” or “ . . . the story is asserting itself!” So I’m a convert to that philosophy, now.

We’re celebrating the release of THE BOOKMINDER by M. K. Wiseman with a blog tour and Rafflecopter give-away! Visit each blog each day for more chances to win lots of great prizes. If you like epic fantasy, you’ll love this coming-of-age tale of magic and wizards set in the Renaissance era.