In each of The Tarot Mysteries Xana Bard or Thorne Ardall quotes Shakespeare. In The Fool Card the quote is from Hamlet: “The readiness is all.” In The Magician Card it’s “I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing,” from King Lear. A new quote, relevant to the new story, appears in all the subsequent stories.
I didn’t make an overt decision to include a 500-year-old phrase in each book; in the beginning I was just trying to write my first novel, and “the readiness is all” fit the meaning of the Fool Card so aptly that the quote went in that book and in fact was Xana’s last comment. The Fool is about to walk off the cliff’s edge, in spite of the warning barked by his little white dog, and he doesn’t care. He’s ready to the experience and he’s trusting in the net the universe will provide at some point, and here he goes.
But meanwhile, how unwitting could the Shakespeare references have been, when I named my protagonist Rosalind Alexandra Bard? And how lucky was I to set things up that way, intentionally or cluelessly, when the source material Shakespeare provides is so rich a motherlode to draw from?
