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Rina Kent on God of Fury
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
Planned from the first book, not invented laterReaders began asking about an MM entry in the Legacy of Gods series well before God of Fury arrived, and the answer was never ambiguous. The book’s existence was wired into the series plan from the start.
Yes, there will be an MM book in Legacy of Gods.
The same series architecture that promised an MM book also named its protagonist years in advance. Landon, the character at the center of God of Fury, was not a late addition invented to fill a gap.
Landon, Brandon, and Nikolai will get their books.
Behind every difficult character Kent writes is a reflex that goes back decades. The instinct to defend the figure everyone else dismisses arrived before they could articulate it, and it arrived loud.
At the tender age of five, I fell hopelessly in love with a villain from an obscure indie film. When he met his untimely end, I sobbed inconsolably, wailing that it simply wasn’t ‘fair.’ My family watched, half-amused, half-bewildered, as I stood up for the misunderstood bad guy.
That reflex became a creative commitment. God of Fury puts a character on the page who is, by the series’ own terms, exactly that misunderstood bad guy.
The childhood moment of grief over a villain hardened into something deliberate. Kent frames the whole arc of their fiction as a response to it.
I made it my mission to be their voice and give them the endings they deserve. It began with tales of monsters but soon evolved into stories about the fierce women brave enough to love them.
How they wrote it
Characters who arrive before the plot doesAsked about the relationship between character and story in her process, Kent described an order of operations that explains why readers find her leads so fully formed by the time a plot kicks in around them.
They actually come hand in hand, but usually, the characters live with me long before the complete plot comes along. That’s part of the reason why I write extremely character-driven books.
The character-first approach doesn’t mean the process is loose. Kent structures her production schedule so that by the time a book reaches readers, it has moved through several layers of scrutiny.
I write months beforehand so the book can have time for beta readers, editors and proofreaders. I’m very goal-oriented and I make a clear schedule then stick to it.
Writing dark male leads at length means spending extended time in the company of characters who can be genuinely repellent. Kent has named the internal cost of that without softening it.
The darkness gets too much when I personally hate my male characters, but I push through those feelings anyway, because I eventually love them.
Before Kent built the Legacy of Gods world, she was already working against the grain of what was expected of her. That early stubbornness shaped the voice the series eventually runs on.
I was always a rebel who wrote what I connected with the most.
What they want us to sit with
Absorption over analysisOf all the reader responses Kent has received, one has stayed with them. It describes something closer to a hallucination than a reading experience, and it’s the benchmark they measure their own work against.
The one that remained with me was something a reader said about how she completely forgot that she was reading a book. She was so engrossed and could see everything so vividly that she lived the journey in one sitting and almost cried when she had to go back to reality. That made me feel so fuzzy inside.
God of Fury follows a protagonist whose interiority readers have called consuming. Whether the book delivers the same kind of total absorption Kent describes here is a question worth bringing to book club.