HEIDI CIECIURA #thrillerwithlove

I have lightbulb moments all the time, quite often at the most inconvenient times like in the bath, on the walk to the supermarket, or in the middle of the night. You know, when there’s no paper or pens within reach and you’re just begging your memory to keep some trace of the idea until you are able to jot it down. I don’t own a notebook for flashes of inspiration. Generally I believe most of the ideas I get are crap, or at least not worth clinging on to. If they have potential, then they will develop in their own time and become something more substantial that I know I won’t forget. Ever. Because ideas I engage with just won’t leave me alone. They keep niggling away in the corners of my mind, growing, developing into little monsters with a will of their own. Congregating together, battling for dominance, scrabbling for attention. And the idea for THIS project is the largest of the clamouring critters.

About seven or eight years ago I stumbled across the television show Ancient Aliens (spoiler alert, there are NO ancient aliens in my book)! This series is great entertainment, whether you see merit in the concept or not. Do I believe a civilisation of ancient aliens visited earth and basically did everything from build monoliths to create AI? Well, it doesn’t really matter if I do or don’t, that isn’t how inspiration works. The point is, something about the idea, the way the narrator spoke with an authoritative and mildly conspiratorial voice, the patterns and links between everything across the entirety of human existence that almost definitely were wild theories with no actual basis in reality, spoke to me and my love of the mystery of human origins, prehistory, ancient civilisations and speculative fiction. This is how the seed of this project sparked into existence.

“Oh my goodness, this would make a great book!” I told my tolerant Other Half, (living with a creative when you aren’t a creative can be a challenge 😏). He didn’t really say much, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t need him to tell me it had great potential, I was already sold. I couldn’t stop thinking about the possible links between the Nazca Lines, Teotihuacan, Egyptian engravings, crystals, ancient oral mythologies etc and the possibility of a forgotten civilisation. The seed took root when, in a Barnados charity shop, I came across Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock. I bought the sequel, then the final book in the trilogy: Magicians of the Gods, and America Before, respectively. I read Underworld. Then I moved on to other authors in a similar vein: Laurence Gardner, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Colin Wilson, Robert Bauval, Samuel Noah Kramer, to name a few. I read Ancient Origins magazine; perused books and websites devoted to cryptoanalysis – all of this research building on top of the knowledge I had gained from a lifetime of inquisitiveness about archeology, mythology, and human origins.

I spent five years researching the foundation of my story, realising quickly that there was enough of a plausible link between oral narratives, biblical mythology, human origins, ancient sites etc for multiple books in a series. I knew I wanted my characters to solve puzzles and decode cryptic clues, that I wanted them to travel to all the corners of the globe in their mission to stop the ‘treasure’ they hunted from falling into the wrong hands. And I knew I wanted a romantic plot line. The seedling grew stronger and stronger until I had character ideas, artefacts to hunt for, and a clear idea of the tone and content I wanted in this specific project.

I don’t always do this level of research before starting a book. Most of the time it isn’t necessary, but in order to be able to begin writing, I needed to understand the background of about 40,000 years of human existence (and more)… there is so much more research to go before I hit The End, but finally I was happy I had a solid enough foundation to move to the next stage: The Outline.