Angel & Monica
By Helen Dale
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Kingdom of the Wicked represented a change of genre for me. I had an established reputation as a writer of literary fiction and political commentary and no plans to venture into the realm of speculative fiction. Once I realized that’s what I was doing, however, I sought to combine the worldbuilding and plotting of genre with the careful character development of literary fiction, which meant I wrote a lot. And as is often the case, some of what I’d written had to go. Even after the editorial process, Kingdom of the Wicked turned into a two-book series (Book I: Rules; Book II: Order) with a third book left on the cutting-room floor.
Much of what my editor removed was surplus to requirements—self-indulgent, meandering, or irrelevant—but some of i
