TLDR: I got so invested in the backstories of Kallista and Geni from A Prayer for the Pirate Queen. So I wrote them a prequel, in which I explore their backstories at length, and give them absolutely no 100% victories 😅
CURRENT STATUS: First draft written, sitting in drawer for now
Lore Drops is a series here and on my main site where I do one big long post as a FAQ about my various projects over time. As time goes by and my writing career history gets more and more convoluted, this provides people who feel like they have come in halfway with a way to catch back up into the conversation. These Lore Drops are living documents which I will add to as things occur to me. Feel free to ask questions, and watch as the answers become part of the ever-growing lore.
Brief Plot Description (low-spoilers – but it’s a prequel anyway!):
At a naval dinner in the capital city of Seraphinople, ten years before the events of A Prayer for the Pirate Queen, Commander Kallista Audax and Doctor Eugenia Philistos shake hands. Though they will not meet again for another decade, this dinner sets into motion a chain of events that will ready them to become the women they will be when they reunite on that fateful night in Didaea.
For Geni, that dinner, and a series of events afterwards drives her to the wrenching realisation that she is, and always has been, a joellian (the in-world word for ‘lesbian’). She explores this idea tentatively, terrified of busting up her ‘perfect’ life with a husband and two children, a nice house and a job she loves.
For Kallista, that dinner is interrupted by a message that her father is ill, and will die within the year. Kallista is determined to get promoted to captain before he dies. Her mother tries to pressure her to leave the Navy to help take care of him, but instead, her dire warnings of horrible sexism (and worse) in the Navy only inspire Kallista to investigate further and root it out.
At the halfway point, we throw everything up in the air – Geni, pursed by the harsh judgement of society, retires to the nunnery where she learns to expand her medical practice to encompass healing magic; and Kallista meanwhile has gone to sea, where she will see injustices occur with far more consequential immediacy than the murky historical occurences she was formerly documenting.
And in the end? They both kinda sorta get some of what they want, but not everything. But most importantly: they’re several steps closer to being the people who will eventually meet and fall in love.
Origin:
See the Lore Drop #2 about A Prayer for the Pirate Queen if you need that context.
At some point after draft one of Prayer, after my spouse said I ought to turn it into a trilogy and maybe even a series beyond that, I started to think about the ‘roadmap’ in terms of a kind of compass, that looks like this:
I wasn’t sure at first which direction I wanted to travel in next, and I needed to revise Prayer one more time in the interrim, so I didn’t make my mind up until around June/July of 2025. I collected ideas for all these various directions. I even thought I was going to do the spin-off FM+DD first, because I do kinda need to know what happens in that first before I can forge on with the main trilogy sequels!
However, at some point in later June, early July, I met a major milestone in my mainstream persona’s writing career by submitting a significant work I’d been revising for a long time. After that, I just knew that the prequel was what want to come bursting out of me, because this one was really going to be from the heart. I had let Kallista and Geni’s struggles bleed into me, to the point where I couldn’t get them out of my head. I had to share with the world the things that brought them to the point where, a decade later, they would be in the right place to meet each other again and this time actually take notice of each other and be right for each other… against the backdrop of fighting imperialism, racism and sexism, and swashbuckling on the high seas. As goes the conversation in the dialogue-only prologue:
“… tell me what brought you here.”
“You know what brought me here.”
“No, further back. Tell me about the woman who upended everything, and ended up here.”
The working title was Before We Met, but pretty soon it became Before Queens and Saints, which for me is a reference to an idea I was exploring in the text: how much of what we do in life is pre-determined, versus how much is actually our choice? How much of who Kallista and Geni were then, and who they become in time, is because of things out of their control, versus things they can and did control?
I wrote the book very slowly, starting in July, just gently, taking my time. Usually I would only write 500 or so words per session, but on occasion, whoever’s chapter it was would grab me by the hand and I just had to run to keep up. In this wise, I got to the end of October with 48K words. It was very stop/start, because there were a few deadlines between July and October for things like short stories and writing life admin that I spent my daily words on. But I was ready to launch into November and finish the remaining estimated 48K. By accident, I ended up perfectly at the halfway point, where Geni goes to the nunnery, and Kallista goes to sea, so I was ready to go on some very new contexts, hitting the ground running in a private discord writeathon between friends. It was kinda almost a fresh start.
I ended up finishing the remaining 48K words during November in a passionate rush of needing to write these stories, despite bronchitis banishing me to my bed in the middle of the month. I finished the final <1500 words on the 1st of December, and went tools down…
… where I remain, as of writing this post. I want to make a few little improvements to it, some that have already occured to me and others that are yet to occur to me, but I must give it at least a month for a break, and to let those improvements be more obvious with a little difference.
Next step: handing over to an alpha reader/s before tackling Draft Two.
The music of Before Queens and Saints:
I listened to the Prayer soundtrack for most of the first few months of drafting this, but something developed over time. I had different CDs in my car which would each last about a month before I wanted to hear something different. Those CDs each started to define an entire month for me, so August 2025 will always feel like Get Behind Me Satan by the White Stripes, and September 2025 was Pegasus by Phoenix Foundation, then October was the discography of Florence + the Machine. So by the time I reached November, and I was writing the second half of the book for in the writeathon, I actually had all the pieces in my head. I built this playlist by looking at the Prayer playlist and plucking out the things which felt appropriate from there – wistful romance but NOT romance fulfilled or anything too horny, and no badassery, not yet! – and then I plugged in lots of songs from the aforementioned albums. Funnily enough, I never thought this while writing Prayer, but after BQ&S, Florence + the Machine just seems like an obvious choice for the soundtrack of Geni’s life, with all it’s references to religion, and singing about feeling like a mess, or feeling unfilfiled. (Besides the fact that, like Geni’s original inspiration Doctor Beverly Crusher from Star Trek: TNG, Florence Welch serves unhinged redhead [sadly, I’m bottle-red, so I can only aspire 😂].)
Kara Moon - Author of adult fantasy romance 