Leopold: Diversity and Variety of Characters in Story

Originally posted at Making It Happen in October 2018.

Good day folks!

Thanks for joining me to celebrate my newest release, Leopold (Saga of the Bold People 1). It is an m/m romance sci-fi epic, and it’s the first book of a 6-book saga. I am super excited to finally release this bad boy that’s taken me around eight years to revise and edit.

When I decided this story had to be part of a series, I knew I wanted lots of diversity. Not only concerning alien species and their cultures/societies but for humans as well. I wanted to represent a lot of different ideas for aliens and humans and to show that the universe has to have numerous ways of creating and building things and creatures. The universe likes variety and I wanted to illustrate that. Plus, sci-fi, so what’s the point if I don’t use that creative license to explore?

From the start I knew I wanted one of my secondary characters, Sasha, to be black. She is a girl that Leopold rescues early in the story. She is going to be vitally important as the series progresses and will have her own story and romance later on.

When I involve more humans in book 3, I want to show a variety of ethnicities, races, and orientations. Humans are quite the colorful crowd, and I wanted to use that as another difference between humans and my alien species. Where aliens have more uniform coloring, humans run the spectrum. However, aliens are more progressed when it comes to mating combinations than humans are. Since Leopold spent his adult live among aliens, he doesn’t blink an eye at their customs and matings. He honestly doesn’t care about things that don’t affect them, and how other species procreate and organize their society is low priority. He only starts to care when he’s captured by Mastrodai and forced to adhere to his culture’s rules.

I plan to have more diverse human characters as the series progresses. In book 3 we will meet the human resistance and their council of leaders. I have exciting plans for that bunch.

I am currently working on four series simultaneously (because I am a glutton for punishment, apparently) and several stand-alones with plans for a couple of trilogies.

I have three stories contracted with Dreamspinner Press for 2019: a vampire story, the latest shifter book (#13), and the prequel to “On Wings of Thunder.”

Until next time,

May dragons guard your dreams,

M.D. Grimm