The Beach Where The Dawnshield Order Began

I’ve just come home from Woolacombe Beach. There’s sand somewhere in half my belongings, my wetsuit is still drying, and after a day of throwing myself enthusiastically at waves on a bodyboard, I’m discovering muscles I had apparently forgotten existed. Yet I’d have happily done more if the surf had been in our favour.

Back at Woolacombe.

Eighteen years after my first trip here, and apparently still incapable of resisting a bodyboard.

It has also been fifteen days since my last journal entry. For once, I think I have a good excuse.

Woolacombe is one of those places that has become woven through my life. I first came here eighteen years ago, on my first holiday away with friends. It was also where I first tried bodyboarding, something I have apparently decided I am going to continue doing for as long as my knees, shoulders and the waves permit it.

Over the years, we’ve stayed at different campsites, returned in different combinations, and accumulated the sort of memories that become increasingly precious simply because there are so many of them. Sleeping under canvas with my husband and staying in a wooden cabin with friends, where we decided bedrooms were for losers and dragged all our mattresses into one room for a six-person, week-long sleepover. Long walks, cold water, sunburn. Ridiculous conversations, silly antics, balloons because why not. Fish and chips. Getting knocked off bodyboards, swallowing half the sea, getting straight back onto them. My sister shouting “Nothing to lose!” while bodyboarding directly over a small child. Sitting on the sand afterwards, exhausted and happy. And a great deal of laughter.

One of those early Woolacombe holidays. We were considerably younger. Our bodyboarding technique was not necessarily any better.

But Woolacombe holds another memory for me too. It is where The Dawnshield Order began to become real.

Where Evander Found His Voice

There was a point when Evander Drake existed in my imagination, but not yet as the man he would eventually become. Woolacombe was one of the places where that changed.

Somewhere amongst the sea, the cliffs, the enormous skies and those evenings when the beach begins to empty, Evander's story started acquiring shape. Serenya appeared. Kaelen followed. Thalen began becoming more than a name and a role.

Relationships formed and voices became clearer. Early scenes began arriving, sometimes because I was looking directly at the sort of landscape I wanted these characters to inhabit.

Looking back at some of that early writing now, the influence is not exactly subtle.

One scene between Evander and Serenya began like this:

The town had gone quiet, gulls wheeling above the cliffs as the tide rolled in silver under the moon. Evander found Serenya standing barefoot on the sand, skirts caught in the breeze, her gaze far out at sea.

He cleared his throat softly. “You’ll catch a chill.”

“Not from the sea. She’s always been kind to me. Fierce, but kind.”

He stepped beside her, boots sinking into the wet sand. For a moment neither spoke, the only sound the wash of waves.

Then, softer than he meant: “I used to think mercy was easier than steel. Turns out, it cuts just as deep.”

She glanced at him then, her expression unreadable, though her eyes shone in the moonlight. “And yet you keep carrying it. Even when it breaks you.”

He shrugged, staring out to the horizon. “If I stop, I don’t know who I am.”

Silence stretched. The tide crept over their toes.

Her hand brushed his, tentative, accidental, but it lingered a heartbeat too long. He wanted to turn, to catch it, to close the last inches and let himself finally fall. But just as he shifted, she pulled back, folding her arms tight against her chest.

“We’re fools, you and I. Walking edges we can’t afford to cross.” And she turned away, leaving him with the salt-wind and the ache of what almost was.

The scene has changed as the books have changed. The characters have changed too. That is the nature of writing something over many months.

But I can still look at those words and know where some of them came from.

I know that sea.

I know those cliffs.

I know the feeling of wet sand beneath your feet and the wind coming off the water.

Woolacombe Beach — and, without my realising it at the time, part of the inspiration for the landscapes of The Dawnshield Order.

Woolacombe found its way into my fictional world long before I realised quite how much of it I was carrying home.

Not Just the Sea

I don't think Woolacombe only gave The Dawnshield Order its coastline; it gave the story some of its laughter too. There is another little piece of dialogue from those early days that has stayed with me.

Kaelen asks Evander: “Evander… can I ask you something? Do you think anyone will tell stories of us one day?”

And Evander answers: “If they do, I hope they remember the laughter, not just the blood.”

That line means rather more to me now than it did when I first wrote it.

Fantasy stories have a habit of remembering the dramatic things: the battles, the deaths, the betrayals and the sacrifices.

The Dawnshield Order certainly has its share of all of those.

But when I think about the people I love, that isn't how memory works. I remember the stupid things.

I remember jokes which would make absolutely no sense if I attempted to explain them to anyone else. I remember friends lying on bodyboards in the sand.

I remember falling into waves, most spectacularly last Thursday when I attempted to swallow half the sea, some jellyfish and my own bodyboard.

I remember the conversations that happen when everyone is tired.

I remember the campsite mornings and the long evenings and the strange little traditions that appear without anyone deciding they ought to become traditions.

And perhaps that is part of why friendship became so important in these books.

One of my favourite pastimes.

Different years, different combinations of friends and family, but somehow we always end up back here.

For me, this is why the moments between the battles matter, why people eating together matter, why teasing matters and why quiet conversations matter.

Why a frightened young squire asking his captain a question can matter as much to me as a sword fight. When terrible things happen to these characters, I don't want the reader merely to know what has been lost. I want them to remember what it sounded like when those people laughed together.

Eighteen Years Later

There is something strange about returning to a place often enough that you begin to carry several versions of yourself around it. I can stand on Woolacombe Beach now and remember being here eighteen years ago.

I can remember my first attempt at bodyboarding. I can remember older holidays and different campsites that no longer exist and people at different stages of their lives. The friend I originally went with is now a mum herself, which just blows my mind. We’ve been friends for 32 years.

And now I can remember sitting here with characters beginning to form in my imagination, without having the faintest idea how important they would eventually become to me. Evander did not arrive fully formed. Neither did Serenya, Kaelen or Thalen. Neither did their world.

But somewhere on this beach they began to become people rather than ideas. And now, a year after those first ideas began taking shape, I can return to the same stretch of sand with friends and family, pull on a wetsuit, grab a bodyboard and head back into the sea.

There are newer photographs now. There are older ones in which we all look alarmingly young.

The people in them have grown and changed. Life has happened. Eighteen years have passed.

But there is still the beach, still the sea, still laughter.

And somewhere between those memories is the beginning of The Dawnshield Order.

Woolacombe didn't only give the story its sea. It gave it some of its laughter.

I think Evander would approve.