Magic Thursday: It's never too late to follow your dreams with K.E. Turner!

Years ago, in the back seat of my parent’s car—no, this is NOT going where you think it’s going (lol)—I hatched an idea for a book. Well, it was more of a tagline. No, maybe just a vibe for a book. You see, my parents were driving me home after surgery and a six-day stay in hospital, and I was on some rather fabulous, perfectly legal and doctor prescribed drugs for the pain. I’m sure my parents thought I was high as a kite—they were probably spot on there—because I kept mumbling “he’s going to keep her in his 
keep” and cackling maniacally at the word repetition.

That was the moment my time travel paranormal series, The Wolves of Langeais, was spawned. Specifically, the idea behind book one, Wolf’s Keep; the story of a twenty-first century woman trapped back in time in the medieval keep of a man who the world believed to be a monster. He’s a werewolf, a monster by tenth century standards. It turns out he’s not the real bad guy, and the woman falls in love with him. Of course. It was always going to be a romance.

I suspect Karen Marie Moning’s Highlander series may have influenced me (just a wee bit), and a few other paranormal romances I’d devoured over the previous six days. There’s nothing much to do while you’re recovering from surgery, and daytime television is the pits.


It wasn’t my first idea. I’d been penning stories since high school, my notepad stashed between the pages of my maths textbook, but it was one that stuck with me. One that had more promise than the hastily scribbled, melodramatic ramblings of a teenager.

Then life got in the way. I forgot about my idea and I shelved my dreams of being a writer. Fast forward a few years, and I’m cleaning out the files on my computer and I come across the beginnings of a little story about a werewolf, a medieval keep and an archaeologist who ends up stuck in the tenth century.

I started reading it. Twenty minutes later, I had to admit it wasn’t half bad. An hour later, I’m making edits, correcting typos, and changing out or deleting dialogue tags as I went.

Maybe I had something here.

I had rekindled my dream of being a writer.

As children, adults ask us, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” People comment on the games we play, on our interests, our likes and dislikes when we are as young as five. She’s going to make a great teacher a mother might say to a daughter holding court in the sandpit. His favourite toy is a fire truck. Perhaps he’ll be a firefighter. In high school, we choose subjects that put us on a path to a career goal, as though at seventeen or eighteen we know our life trajectory and have clear ideas of where we see 
ourselves over the next thirty years.

Many of us do. My brother has always wanted to be an engineer. He went to university and became an engineer. But not all of us are that certain. Not all of us go straight to university as assured of our destiny as we are that the sun will rise again tomorrow.

Others, like me, can spend years switching from one job to the next, trying to figure out what it is we are meant to do, searching for that elusive career that fits us. I see my niece and nephew struggling to decide what to do with their life. They’re panicking because they haven’t got it all figured out yet. They’re nineteen and twenty-one.

In 2022, I signed a contract with Totally Bound Publishing for Wolf’s Keep, the Wolves of Langeais Book One. I was fifty years old. When I wrote my first ‘novel’, I was fifteen.

That day, in the back seat of my parent’s car, I was thirty-three.

By the end of this year, I’ll have released two more novels—Wolf’s Prize and Wolf’s Redemption—and submitted a fourth to my publisher.

To my niece and nephew, I am unequivocal proof that it is possible to pursue your dreams at whatever age. That it’s okay that they haven’t got all the answers right now. That there’s nothing wrong with trying different things until one day, something clicks for them. Something speaks to them, and says, yes, this is what I really want to do. This is the dream, the goal I want to pursue.

It would have been nice to have published a book at a much younger age. The older I get, the faster technology moves, and I worry I won’t keep up. But I didn’t. and I am published now. I made it. And I still have a lot left in the tank, and a lot of ideas floating around in my brain. I can learn new things, new technologies, new programs. There’s a YouTube video on just about everything.

What I have learnt, what I know now, is some dreams take longer to come to fruition, and it’s never too late to try for them.


x

Wolf’s Keep

The Wolves of Langeais Book 1

He’s all she loathes. She’s everything he needs. Time isn’t the only barrier she’ll cross to gain her heart’s desire.

Archaeologist Erin Richardson loves her job, but the dig in France is something else. A crumbling keep, a dungeon and the search for legendary chevalier Gaharet d’Louncrais… Her imagination is running overtime. Thank God he’s long dead and only comes to life in her dreams. Until a mysterious amulet sends her back to the tenth century. Now her fantasy has become her reality.

Gaharet d’Louncrais needs a wife. He’s powerful and handsome and women constantly vie for his attention. If they knew his secret, they’d run for their lives. Forget love. Forget finding his true mate. He’d forsake it all to save his wolf pack from extinction. But when Erin appears, with her strange clothes and her even stranger tale, she stirs his inner beast. He wants nothing more than to claim her as

his own.

Erin knows a player when she sees one. Arrogant and charming, he’s everything she’s guarded her heart against. The Dark Ages are no fairy-tale, and she will need to fight to survive, but the most dangerous thing of all is the way Gaharet makes her feel.

She needs to find a way home. Gaharet needs her to stay. And now he’s found her, he plans on never letting her go.

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K.E. Turner 

K.E. Turner can't remember a time when she wasn't writing stories or reading books—as a teenager in class instead of doing math, in her lunch break at work, or at home when there's housework to be done. With a love of history, suspense, paranormal, and romance, she enjoys combining more than one element in her stories.

She writes spicy paranormal romances with strong but good-hearted heroes, smart, sassy heroines, and an unexpected villain or two, to shake things up.

She lives with her husband in Western Australia.

Find her at keturnerbooks.com or instagram.