The Flower of King and Knights

Appendix I

The Beginning Concepts

I include these next few appendixes in order to achieve two main goals. The first is to allow the reader to gain a better understanding of the mythos and sources of the legends of King Arthur with which this book is based upon. The second is to allow one to gain better insight into the creative process that led to the creation of this novel that you have now read, and to help illuminate points and themes that might have been hidden in the text.

The book itself began several years ago, as a method for me to temporarily escape what I have seen as a mundane and almost soul crushing occupation of corporate retail. The decision to base the story in the world of King Arthur was based upon watching and hearing the joy in my father’s voice when he would talk about his love for the legend and story of Arthur Pendragon. Ironically, this first novel was entirely different in its original concept than what it is now. Furthermore, looking at the finished product, I am glad that the original story was scrapped entirely.

The original project was tentatively titled, “The Black Knight” and followed the adventures of Mordred and his love interest Hannah, as they fought the evil machinations of a little known brother from the Arthur mythos, Arn, and the duo would eventually pave the way for Mordred’s redemption and inheriting his rightful place to the throne. There were few other aspects of the book that I was hoping to include, (knights imbedded with supernatural powers, fantastic chase scenes, and combining the legendary Paladins of Charlemagne with the Knights of the Table Round). As you can see, and as I eventually found, the book was too farfetched for its own good, and the story began to turn from one that I would love to read, into one that I would lambast with my friends and family.

As such, I abandoned the idea and only again took the task of writing the book when hearing my father speak of Arthur and the famous novel by T.H. White, “The Once and Future King”. Hearing my father’s voice seemed to reignite my own passion for the tales, as if they had been sparked for the first time, a rebirth from an unknown death. Thus, the drive to write “The Flower of King and Knights” had begun. This was originally a blog, and was somewhat a success, though I never received a single comment pertaining to what the readers thought of the work, which eventually led me to the site Wattpad.com, where the book began to find an audience.

Certain ideas and themes were carried from the original project to this one; the knights buried under Camelot and turned into stone, Hannah’s death and imbedding into a magical object (while the character was revised into Cecilia), and the existence of two worlds, but for the most part, the story had changed drastically.

The greatest change, and one that I hoped sets it apart from other stories that deal with the story of a post-Arthur world, was that I wanted it to be as true to the original legend of the king and his noble knights. Unlike many movies, novels and television programs that ignore or re-write the legends to fit the story, I wanted to the story to be as true of a sequel to the legends as they could.

To this extent I used what many consider the definitive source for all Arthur based literature, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. This helped to removed common mistakes of the modern perception of the Arthur story, but also introduced layers and storylines that would give the book, or at least I hope it would, a depth in the storyline that was greatly absent from recent attempts to take on the King Arthur legend.