Excerpt

The Charming Trilogy Vol. 2

Three Romance Novels (Omnibus)

By Kristine Grayson

Escaping The Real World

Introduction to the Trilogy Omnibus

by Kristine Grayson

Oh, the Charmings.

I did not expect to write a series called The Charming Series. I'm really not sure it's accurate anyway, and it has the taint of bad experience for me.

Like so many authors, I've had bad publishing experiences. However, the worst publishing experience I ever had occurred with the books in this volume.

And it was all redeemed by the changes in publishing. I just had to recover from all the bad stuff.

I spent some time thinking about how I would approach this omnibus. Would I write some nice fluffy introductions or would I tell the truth about the way these books developed? I have some nice fluffy stuff in this volume. Those are the guest blog posts in the extras.

I finally decided on honesty.

Many of you don't care about publishing or what writers go through, so if I go into too much depth in the introductions to the novels, feel free to skip them. (I write this for those of you, like me, who are completists when it comes to reading. Yes, I'm one of those annoying people who read every word of any book I get. I figured if I need permission to skip things, some of you do too.)

Of course, the publishing stuff is drama, and other people's drama can be fun.

This introduction will skip most of that. I want you to know what's in this omnibus volume and why it's all here.

The novels in this volume are among my favorites that I've ever done. They're wacky and weird, and the fairy tales fracture, but they also deal with some themes that matter to many of us.

Like so much of my fiction, Wickedly Charming came from a short story. It was clear when I wrote the story that it was just the opening to something bigger. But I did what any good author does: I waved my hands, implied a happily ever after, and hoped that was enough for the readers.

It wasn't enough for my first reader, my husband Dean. He told me to write the novel.

I really didn't need much more encouragement than that. So I did. The opening of Wickedly Charming, at a book fair, introduced a whole bunch of characters, from Mellie and Dave (the Charming of the book) to Blue, who is the hero of Charming Blue, to (with a sideways mention) Grace and Imperia, Dave's daughters with Cinderella. Wickedly Charming also introduced Gussie and Selda and the Archetype Place, and Cantankerous Belle (Tinker Belle's…gruff…relation) and a few other folk who will probably get their own books down the road.

I included the short story that started this round of Grayson books. "The Charming Way" is the opening to the novel, more or less, but it's here for you completists and wannabe writers, so that you can see how a short story differs from a novel (particularly at the end).

I have also included a side short story that might become something more. Throughout Wickedly Charming, Dave's daughters, Grace and Imperia, are dealing with their move to Los Angeles. That includes attending a new school. The novel hints at problems the girls are suffering through, but never delves into those problems because the book isn't about the girls.

It's about Prince Charming falling in love with Snow White's evil stepmother. Yeah. My imagination has a field day with all of this stuff sometimes.

Anyway, I was worried about Dave's daughters, so I had to write the story of what was going on with them. And that became "Standing Up For Grace," which is also included in this volume.

So in the Wickedly Charming extras, you get two stories—the origin story of this part of the series (if you will) and a side story about Imperia and Grace. (I adore both girls. Just sayin'.)

In addition, you'll get some fluff.

The publisher I was with for Wickedly Charming and Charming Blue was experimenting with blog tours. To be fair, this happened in 2011 and 2012, when everyone believed that blog tours would increase book sales. Turns out the conventional wisdom was wrong (as it often is). Blog tours bump the traffic for the website, but not for the books promoted on the website.

That's a side feature though.

The guest blogs that I wrote are fun and frothy and silly. And there are a lot of them, both for Wickedly Charming and Charming Blue. I found the guest blogs as I was putting the Grayson omnibuses together, and I decided to include them.

So if you want fun and froth to accompany the novels, read the blog tour posts. They are (as I say in those introductions) exactly as I wrote them years ago. So some of the stuff in them is optimistic, other stuff reflects the world in 2011.

Nonetheless, worth reading, in my opinion.

Or you can simply read the novels.

Wickedly Charming introduces the LA section of my Grayson world, and that Los Angeles is similar to the Los Angeles in our (sadly non-magical) world. The movie industry dominates and distorts everything in that city. But people do live a regular life there, as well.

Charming Blue expands on the world created in Wickedly Charming and takes us to rehab, which is where a lot of the movie people end up. (Blue is there for an entirely different reason.)

And Hidden Charm also touches on the movie industry a bit, but most of it takes place in the middle of a crisis, so there's less Los Angeles, and a lot more magic.

Those of you who have read the previous Grayson novels will see a few of your favorites here. And those of you who haven't might want to look at the earlier series to see where some of the characters (and I mean that in both senses of the word) came from.

Because of the publishing issues mentioned above and because of health issues (and a few other things), I took a hiatus from the Grayson books. I'm back now, and the future works mentioned in those blog posts have re-entered the writing queue.

Sometimes real life events influence a writer's schedule. And sometimes taking time away from the real world is a good thing.

Escape from reality is one of the reasons I believe that romance exists. One of the reason I write these fun and goofy novels is to give myself a palate cleanser from the darker work I write under my other names (Kris Nelscott and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, mostly). After years away, I have a lot of palate to be cleansed.

Okay, that didn't sound the way I meant it to.

But you know what I mean. I have a lot of writing to do. And smiling. And letting the goofy side of my muse roam.

My muse probably has more in common with Cantankerous Belle than with Tinker Belle. Which is why I have a lot more fun with these books.

But you probably knew that…

—Kristine Grayson

Las Vegas, Nevada

December 12, 2018