Franzi asked Sherwood Smith:

Crown Duel is one of my favorite books of all time, one that I come back to almost every year. Im sure you've been asked before, but I am curious about your process writing it- How long did it take you? Was the first draft very different than the final? Looking back, is there anything you would change about it? Thank you and have a great day!

Sherwood Smith Thank you! I'm glad you still enjoy it! I wrote the first half when I was 20, studying abroad. I was unexpectedly homesick and came up hard against my own ignorance. I wrote the first half as consolation for being cold all the time in my very first winter. I don't remember how long it took--a couple weeks? The second half I wrote a couple years later, when I was in graduate school, and deep in history studies. I was reading so much about social history and courtly life that it sort of wrote itself, again as an escape from studies. Those handwritten drafts were pretty incoherent but still fun, I thought, when I decided why not type them up and try to publish them, years later. If I were to rewrite it from the ground up now, it'd probably be a completely different story. Mel is so peripheral to the main action--but on the other hand, it was fun being in her maddeningly stubborn head for a time!

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