There’s a story I’ve loved since high school, which is that John Steinbeck (yes, that John Steinbeck, the Grapes of Wrath guy) was obsessed with King Arthur from a young age, and decided he was going to translate Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur for a modern audience. But he could never bring himself to get any further than Guinevere and Lancelot’s first betrayal. Every time he got to the place where the two lovers finally became unfaithful to their king, he despaired and couldn’t make himself go on.

I’m like 99% sure that story is apocryphal, and now I don’t even remember where I heard it, but to a teenage Sierra that didn’t matter. What mattered is that I felt the same way as John Steinbeck, and I was violently relieved to hear I wasn’t the only one who hated the love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot.

See, I also have been obsessed with Arthuriana from a young age, starting from the time my mother handed me a yellowed copy of The Once and Future King that smelled like must and cigarettes. (Even now I can’t smell a cigarette without thinking of Archimedes the owl.) It was my first exposure to King Arthur, and a better introduction I can’t imagine, and it was followed by all the staples of the Arthur genre in my teenage years: The Mists of Avalon (which is problematic in light of the things we know about its creator now, but I can’t deny the effect it had on my teenage psyche with its vision of feminism and paganism), Mary Stewart’s Crystal Cave trilogy and the wrenching The Wicked Day, Nancy McKenzie’s The Queen of Camelot, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Rosalind Miles’ Queen of the Summer Country, Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King, John Boorman’s Excalibur (which is ridiculous and amazing), Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (which features a very stoic Clive Owen and a very broody Ioan Gruffudd and also Hannibal and Will Graham and Kiera Knightley in a leather bra—I don’t know that it’s a good movie but you should definitely watch it), and finally in college, I went back to the sources and read Malory and Tennyson and Chretien de Troyes and that wacky Geoffrey of Monmouth. I also read all the nonfiction—Geoffrey Ashe and Leslie Alcock and anything my poor college hands could dig up at secondhand bookstores.

From these books I learned that Lancelot was a late French invention designed to entertain listeners who gobbled up tales of courtly love, that in the oldest stories, it seems to be Mordred that Guinevere betrays Arthur with, that every version of Arthur’s story from Culhwch and Olwen to Meg Cabot’s Avalon High is a vehicle to reflect the anxieties and beliefs of the society that produced it. The King Arthur legend is a mood-ring—it can be a glittering tale of chivalry and brave deeds or it can be a gritty war narrative or anything in between—and it’s up to us to decide which it is.

In fact, the very first book I ever wrote—a high school project that leaked into my early college years—was my own Arthur retelling, and in it I poured all of my frustrations and hopes about the characters. And chief among those frustrations was the one I shared with John Steinbeck—how could Lancelot and Guinevere betray Arthur like that? Why? If you served the bravest, kindest man you’d ever known, how could you scamper off to be unfaithful to him?

In fact, despite the best efforts of T.H. White with his closeted sadist Lancelot and Nancy McKenzie with her loyal-but-conflicted take on the knight, I never could find myself caring about Lancelot at all. It’s like offering someone a hot dog when they’re eating steak—who would take the knight when they could have the king?

But, in my (admittedly perverted) teenage mind, I could understand falling in love with Mordred. He was dangerous and brooding and misunderstood, and that sort of Hamlet-esque type has been my jam for as long as I can remember. And so in my teenage retelling of the legend, I dispose of Lancelot and make the real love triangle between Mordred, Arthur and Guinevere. This book is forever hidden, by the way, because it’s trash, but I’m telling you this so I can explain how and why I’ve had Ash, Greer and Embry’s story in my head for so long, and why I wrote it the way I did. See, I wanted to fix the romance part of the story, I wanted for my own selfish reasons to straighten out the betrayals and the infidelity and rearrange them in a way that suited my own (again, perverted) heart.

First of all, the only thing that made sense to me was to make the three of them love each other. On the face of traditional wisdom, King Arthur’s legends seem to be the practicum of heterosexuality—men being men, ladies being either foul temptresses or helpless damsels, not to mention the entire tragedy ultimately turns on a straight love affair. Yet, as a bisexual teen, it never escaped my notice that beneath the surface, there seemed to be a lot of things that hinted at queerness—T.H. White, famously closeted, made his Lancelot hero-worship Arthur to the point of something tantalizingly close to love, Marion Zimmer Bradley made the hints more explicit with her Lancelet in The Mists of Avalon—and of course it gave birth to that great threesome scene (which Samantha Mathis and Michael Vartan acted out in the miniseries, you should watch it, if only to see the threesome scene and the Beltane scene, and also Angelica Huston sweeping majestically around.) But beyond the modern retellings, I saw it in the old texts too. There’s the strange kiss-sharing game Gawain plays with the Green Knight and the Green Knight’s wife, the time when Sir Lancelot dresses an unconscious Sir Dinadan in a woman’s dress, and then let me present this little tidbit to you from Le Morte D’Arthur itself:

“…Dinadan went unto Palomides, and there either made other great joy, and so they lay together that night. And on the morn early came Sir Tristram and Sir Gareth, and took them in their beds, and so they arose and brake their fast.”

—Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, vol. II, pg. 81

I don’t know about you, but making great joy in a shared bed sounds delightfully eyebrow-raise-y to me.

Secondly, I knew that no Arthur of mine or Guinevere of mine could love the fussy, weak Lancelot of the legend, so I took a little artistic license and I fused my conception of Mordred into my Lancelot character. Embry occupies the same space as Lancelot (because even Sierra isn’t bonkers enough to have a polyamorous love triangle between a father and a son) but I imbued him with all the things I loved best about Mordred. Embry is brooding and a little tortured, he loves imperfectly, he’s the one ultimately to betray Ash. But also—and I refuse to apologize for this—an incestuous secret son was just too fun for a writer to give up, so that’s why we have Lyr along with my Mordred-cum-Lancelot.

Thirdly, I knew that I was going to give Arthur the happily ever after he fucking deserved. In the legends, Arthur and Mordred kill each other on the field of battle, and Arthur clings to life long enough for there to be an extended narrative about him trying to get Sir Bedivere to throw Excalibur back in the fucking lake and Bedivere just cannot follow instructions (unlike my version of him, Ryan Belvedere, who is excellent at following instructions.) Lancelot and Guinevere respectively become a hermit and a nun after Arthur’s death, and so no one gets to live happily ever after. Womp womp.

Not on Sierra’s watch.

Fans of the Arthur story will recognize a few things. Carpathia serves the same function as the Saxons in the legends, for example, and the burning of the boat in Glein echoes a crime that either Morgause or Arthur himself commits in the story, in order to hide the birth of Mordred. The names of the battles—Glein and Caledonia and Bassas—are taken straight from the legend. Melwas, in the stories, is Meliagrance (or Meleagant or Meliagaunt—names are wiggly in the legends sometimes), who is the King of the Summer Country (or of Gorre) who kidnaps Guinevere, and later challenges her fidelity to King Arthur at Camelot, using the bloody sheets leftover in his dungeon as proof. (For all of you who were stressed out reading Embry and Greer’s sex scene in Melwas’s stronghold, blame Malory! He did it first!)

You will recognize Morgan, of course, and I have always had some sympathy for her, which is probably left over from my Bradley days. And I’m sure you recognized Vivienne as my own modern-day Lady of the Lake.

Abilene Corbenic is a combination of Elaine of Corbenic and the Lady of Shalott (also named Elaine of Astolat.) Readers familiar with the legends will see Elaine of Corbenic’s deceptions echoed in Abilene—in the original stories, Elaine tricks Lancelot into sleeping with her by pretending to be Guinevere, twice actually, which is how she ends up marrying Lancelot and carrying his son Galahad.

Why did I make her the chief villain, as opposed to Mordred or Melwas? In the legends, the final climactic conflict is between a father and a son, and it’s a war for a kingdom. It’s usually portrayed as a masculine narrative, but it doesn’t have to be. I rather liked the idea of sending in some women to disrupt the traditionally male power struggle, and even though it’s a departure from the legend to locate the source of the chaos inside the Elaine character, to me it made the most sense within the world I’d created. The New Camelot series is about love and pain, and the intersection between the two. I show how powerful that intersection is with the Ash-Embry-Greer triad…and I wanted to show how destructive it could be in the character of Abilene. She is the reverse of our lovers, she is the distorted reflection of obsessive love. And I think that the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Corbenic have this quality too—the Lady dies of unrequited love and Elaine of Corbenic (let’s be frank) commits something on the spectrum of sexual assault and rape. These women allow obsessive love to swallow their identities and moralities whole. That is chaos.

Besides, I liked Morgan too much to make her the villain.

Anyway, all that being said, making the villain a woman—and an ‘unstable’ woman at that—carries its own price. I hope that Morgan and Greer and Vivienne are layered and complicated enough to offset any harm I’ve caused in Abilene’s narrative.

As for the kink—well, I could write another two thousand words about that alone—but the simplest explanation I can give for including it is that the King Arthur story is a story about love, power, and the experience of being human. I would say kink is the practice of those same things.

Besides, how fun is it to say the words, “Kinky King Arthur”? It’s so much fun, admit it.

I hope that I’ve done my love of the Arthurian genre justice with my kinky, queer, polyamorous books. I hope I gave Arthur the ending he deserves. I hope my clumsy attempt at translating the legend has been, at the very least, fun for you to read, and I hope that if John Steinbeck was raised from the dead and forced to read it, he’d be able to finally get past the first kiss. All the fun stuff’s after the first kiss, anyway.