I started writing a short story called Beauty Is Only Skin Deep. It was about two sisters — one considered ugly and one considered beautiful — and how differently people treated them because of it. The beautiful sister was adopted, while the “ugly” sister was the biological daughter, and over the course of the story, the two of them slowly came to understand each other better.

I went all out with character outlines and families. The main family, the Littles, originally had seven brothers and one sister: Sage, Dillon, Fergus, Garrik, Hadrien, Viktor Jr., Jerrika, and Darcel — plus their adopted sister, Rayna.

The Quint family had five kids: Jena, Vincent, Nuri, Faryn, and Delisa.

And Rayna? She had a LOT of suitors.

Looking back at those early drafts now is honestly pretty funny. There were so many characters and so little depth — even for the main ones. Over time, I kept the Quint family mostly the same (just tweaked some names) and cut three of the Little brothers altogether.

Once I decided to turn Beauty Is Only Skin Deep into a full novel and include it in Prophecy Series, I rewrote the book and completely redid my character sheets. It was also the first time I fully used character development software throughout the entire writing process. I use Persona, and I still highly recommend it to other writers!

At some point, I knew I wanted to change the title — but nothing felt right. Then one night around 12:30 a.m., as I was trying to fall asleep, the title Child of Beauty suddenly popped into my head. I was instantly wide awake, rushed to my computer, and changed all the books in the series to follow the “Child of —” naming theme.
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It was one of those lightning-bolt creative moments — and I’ve loved the titles ever since.