Monday, January 7, 2013

Book Highlight - The Greystone Series by Taylor Longford

It's been a while since I've picked up a book that I simply could not put down... let alone three books in a row like that!!

Taylor Longford has created an amazing series based on a gargoyle family that I completely fell in love with. The premise is unique, the romance is sweet and the action was enough to have me turning pages well into the night.

You can check out my reviews for each book here:

Valor (Book 1)
Purchase link (currently FREE)


Dare (Book 2)

Reason (Book 3)

It is my total pleasure to have Taylor visit our blog today to share where she got her inspiration for gargoyles from.

Writers draw their ideas from many different sources. Some scour newspapers for material. Others have a muse that dictates the entire contents of a book to them…which is pretty handy. Some ideas visit writers in the form of dreams. Personally, I'm a "what if" writer. Back in elementary school, I discovered I could devote half of my attention to the teacher while I used the other half to daydream. These daydreams usually took the form of "what if things turned out a little differently" or "what if things were not what they seemed". For example: What if my third grade teacher, Mrs. Allen, was actually from another planet. It would certainly explain her short, flame-red hair and wickedly long fingernails.

So, I'm a daydreamer and that's where my gargoyle idea came from. Although I live in America, most of my family is from England and one day I was on tour bus in Oxford (which has a lot of gargoyles). On the tour, I learned that the word "gargoyle" comes from the French word for throat. And the ugly stone carvings that helped to drain rooftops were named thus because of the water that poured from their throats.

So I start thinking… what if there was another race of beings that were known as gargoyles because their throats were marked with ancient runes. And what if these gargoyles weren't ugly at all; they were beautiful. And what if they could turn to stone and had wings so that they were actually confused with the stone gargoyles found in places like Oxford. And what if those stone gargoyles that everyone is so familiar with were actually vicious and brutal harpies—the natural born enemies of the beautiful gargoyles with the runes on their necks.

And what if a pack of young gargoyles was trapped between the walls of an old house in England for eight hundred years, only to be discovered again in the twenty-first century…

And before you know it, I'm writing about Valor, Havoc, Reason, Defiance, Dare and Victor.


I adore the premise and love hearing how you came up with this awesome family. Thanks so much for visiting, Taylor.

If you'd like to connect with this talented author, you can find her online here:
Website: http://tlongford.wordpress.com/
Goodreads Author Page
Amazon Author Page

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing this series. It's the first I've heard of it. Going to read more about it.

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  2. Replies
    1. Thanks for stopping by, Melanie. It is a great premise. I hope you enjoy the books if you decide to get them :)

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