Sneak Peek Sundays are now on Saturday; the idea is that I'm going to take all day Sunday off and focus on other things. This week's sneak peek is into The Path of Latan the Clerk. Here, Latan's bodyguard, Haveshi Yellowcrow (from last week's sneak peek), makes something very clear: With his morning hygiene and grooming completed, Latan went over to the fire where the male guards were eating breakfast. Jokun dished up a pile of meat and onion hash onto a tin plate and handed it to him. As he ate, Haveshi Yellowcrow emerged from the woods and sat down by the fire. Instead of eating, she took a small mirror out of a pouch she was carrying, along with a dark stick, and began applying a black line around her eyes. When that was finished, she took out a small ceramic pot, opened it and dipped a fingertip in it, and applied a red substance to her lips. As she put the small pot of lip color back in her pouch, she glanced over at Latan and met his eyes. His face flamed at having been caught staring. He was sworn to celibacy in the service of a Source, and had no business being so fascinated by the sight of a woman putting on cosmetics. Besides, it was rude to stare. “You’ve never seen someone putting on makeup before?” she asked. “I, well, no,” he stammered. “I just, it surprised me that a woman in your situation would bother with such things.” “Just because I have a man’s job and a man’s skills doesn’t mean I have to look like a man.” “Ah, well, no, of course not.” Then curiosity led him on. “Don’t you worry, being that you look so obviously like a woman, that someone might try something, er, untoward?” He barely even saw her move. In an instant she was behind him, one arm around his neck in a chokehold, the other pressing the sharp edge of a knife to his throat. “No one,” she said in a low voice in his ear, “tries anything unless I want him to.” The Warrior and The Holy Man, containing "The Path of Haveshi Yellowcrow" and "The Path of Latan the Clerk," is available for Kindle from Amazon.
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Here's a peek inside my Estelend short story, "The Path of Haveshi Yellowcrow": The morning sun grew higher and hotter as the shaman sang. Nervous glances and murmurs were exchanged among the members of the clan; summoning a beast-god was a dangerous business. There was a story that the god of the Bataranisho tribe, a huge female ground-dragon, had once burnt twelve shamans to cinders for summoning her merely to see the size of her eggs. Haveshi wasn’t sure she believed that story — to see the size of a ground-dragon’s eggs, all one had to do was find her nest and look, and the god’s eggs would simply be twice that size — but she still held her breath with everyone else, waiting for Keeaura to arrive. Finally, a great red-gold mountain lion appeared in the gap at the north point of the circle. Haveshi gasped in awe and admiration, as did the rest of the clan members. Keeaura was twice as large as any other mountain lion, and the reddish cast to his pelt glowed like flames in the sun. As the beast-god entered the circle, the shaman continued singing, imploring him to grant wisdom as to the source of the trouble and what was to be done about it. The mountain lion padded on huge paws around the circle several times, first one way and then the other. When he walked past Haveshi and her family, she could see the ripple of powerful muscles beneath his skin and the shimmer of sunlight on his red-gold fur. It made her proud that her tribe had such a magnificent beast as their god, and she was glad that she had made sure that she and her children looked their best for him. As the god continued pacing, admiration slowly turned to nervous tension as the clan members waited to see what he would do. Even ordinary mountain lions were dangerous beasts, and this mountain lion was a god, capable of maiming or killing a full-grown man with a single swipe of his enormous paw and claws as long and sharp as knives. Keeaura padded past Haveshi again, then stopped and turned. Then he stopped again, in front of Haveshi. And growled long and low at her, baring giant, sharp teeth. The Warrior and the Holy Man, containing the stories "The Path of Haveshi Yellowcrow" and "The Path of Latan the Clerk," is available for Kindle at Amazon.
Here's another of my occasional (and hopefully more regular!) Sunday Sneak Peeks. Today, in Chosen of Azara, Sajur Golu, the High Priest of the Madrinan Empire, is up to no good: * * * There was just one matter that Sajur Golu needed to look into before moving forward with his plans, and he had the opportunity to do so as soon as the meeting ended. Princess Juzeva was walking in an inner garden courtyard near the Council chambers while she waited for her husband, who had remained inside to speak to some of the other Councilors. Sajur Golu approached her, his face set in a careful smile. “Good day to you, Your Highness.” She responded with a slight, stiff nod. She was far too polite to ignore him as he suspected she wished to. “I must say, Your Highness,” he said smoothly, “you are looking remarkably well, especially for a Chosen who has been away from her Source for over three months.” The Princess made a slight, involuntary motion with her left hand, towards the crystal Source-token she wore on a chain around her neck, then stopped herself. Sajur Golu kept his expression polite, pleasant, and neutral. “Ah, to be young again. Such marvelous strength and resilience. Good day, Your Highness.” He bowed slightly and walked away, satisfied with what he had learned. Her movement, though almost imperceptible to anyone without his highly developed powers of observation, had confirmed his suspicion that her Source-token held something more than the usual few months’ supply of Source-power. He would have to be sure to get the vial for himself and learn its secrets before he was finished with the Princess. Chosen of Azara is available in ebook and paperback at:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple | Sony | Diesel Smashwords | CreateSpace | All Romance eBooks I've been thinking about this post since reading Dean Wesley Smith's post on setting writing goals for 2014. This year got off to a rocky start for me; I had an abnormal EKG a week before Christmas, which was kind of alarming, and I've been dealing with tests and a lot of anxiety since then. Everything is still inconclusive so far, but right now it looks like we're not dealing with anything immediately dangerous; most likely it's nothing serious, or we've caught something more long-term serious in the early stages. Getting this glimpse of my own mortality had the contradictory effects of making it hard to make future plans and goals (who can make plans for the future when they're afraid they're going to drop dead at any moment?) (seriously, I'm a terrible hypochondriac) and making me really zero in on what I want to accomplish in my life. The main thing I realized, besides wondering who would make the Christmas fudge and homemade dinner rolls at our house if I wasn't around (getting alarming health news right before Christmas really sucks) is that I would be extremely bummed out were I to shuffle off the mortal coil before getting Daughter of the Wildings out. I've instructed my husband that should something happen to me, DoW is to be made available however seems best at the time - put up for sale, or just posted for free, or whatever. The problem is, as it is right now, still in rough draft, it kind of sucks. It's not terrible, but there are parts that make me cringe or that are just plain wrong, and I really don't want it to go out into the world this way. So, with that as my focus, and now that I'm not quite so convinced that I'm going to drop dead at any moment *knock on wood*, here are my plans and goals for the coming year. Although Sarya's Song is the next book scheduled to come out, I'm going to be spending most of my work hours on the initial revision of Daughter of the Wildlings. DoW is a huge project, nearly 300,000 words, and if I'm going to get it released on any kind of schedule, it needs to take priority. This shuffling of priorities will mean that the release of Sarya's Song may be delayed a bit. I'm hoping for a February release, but it may take until March. My target for releasing the first DoW book, Beneath the Canyons, is June, though that may be a bit optimistic. The plan is to get all six books to where once I start releasing the series, a new book can come out about every other month. Once Sarya's Song is out and DoW is well under way towards being released, there are a couple of different areas I'm thinking I'll turn my attention to. One is a couple of partially-written novels set in Estelend, the world of Chosen of Azara. I also had a reviewer say they wished Chosen was a trilogy instead of one book, because they wanted more backstory on some of the characters and events. Rewriting Chosen as a trilogy isn't going to happen - I just don't feel it that way - but I'd like to do a set of stories giving some of the backstory the reviewer mentioned they'd like to know more about. Maybe I'll make this a Camp NaNo project in April or July. And the very first novel I ever wrote, Prince of the Trozdozh, and its sequel are sitting on my hard drive, calling out to me. I think they're probably salvageable, so I want to run them through my revision process and see it they really are something I can release to the public. As far as production goals, right now I can't really set a word count goal. By the end of the year I aim to have released 5 novels (Sarya's Song and the first four Daughter of the Wildings novels) and at least one short story collection (the Chosen of Azara companion stories). I had five releases in 2013, so six releases in 2014 sounds like a good progression. And, onward. Happy New Year, everyone! May it be happy and productive and with a minimum of unpleasant surprises. You may or may not have noticed, a few days ago I posted "The Path of Haveshi Yellowcrow" and "The Path of Latan the Clerk," two connected short (well, kind of long, actually) stories loosely related to Chosen of Azara. They'll be free to read here on the site until Dec. 12, and then they'll go up for sale on Amazon. [Update: these stories are now available on Amazon in a volume titled The Warrior and the Holy Man.] In Chosen of Azara, as Lucie is researching the history of the Madrinan Empire to try to decide if Sevry's story is true, she comes across a passing reference to a discredited Kriethi historian and his female Krunabashai bodyguard. These two stories tell the tale of the historian and the bodyguard. I'd been calling Latan "the Scholar," but he's really just a lowly clerk who dabbles in historical research in his spare time, and since he's such a modest fellow he insisted I change it to "clerk." But he still made it into at least one of the history books of his world. I don't know if he'd be more pleased or embarrassed about that. In the titles, I also replaced "tale" with "path." "Path" is a little more different and interesting, plus a major theme in both stories is the paths life takes us on, both expected and unexpected. Both Haveshi and Latan think they know what they want out of life and exactly how their lives are going to go - they're happy, or at least content, with the paths their lives are following. Then unexpected events force them from those paths and require them to find new ways to live. These two stories are a great example of how old ideas evolve into new ones. Haveshi's story originally started out as a novel set in Estelend [Edit: I have since changed the name of this world to Tehovir] (the same world as Chosen of Azara, with magical Sources playing an important role), with the events the same as in the story and then dragging on and on as Haveshi and her companion Daivashan went from one place to another without actually accomplishing much of anything. Back in those days (early 90s), you either wrote novels or you wrote for the short story market, and I was a novel writer. If I ever decided to dabble my toes again in publishing, I would need novel-length offerings to present to agents and editors. And so I took a story that didn't really have enough story in it to be a novel and tried to stretch it out into one. Then, in the last year or so, when I was looking through my old story files and thinking about the new, expanded possibilities offered by self-publishing - no arbitrary word count or length guidelines set by publishers based on the economics of publishing paper books or magazines; stories could be as long or short as they needed to be - I realized that Haveshi's story would be perfect as a longish short story. She finds her answer without all that pointless wandering around, and sets off for her new life, the end. The other seed of this pair of stories came from this fragment. (And I'm going to be really really brave and post it here exactly as I wrote it umpteen years ago.) "You're the guard Bodric sent?" Sevry stared at the short, sturdy woman in front of him. He hoped there was a mistake. Ok, first of all (besides the head-hopping), you may notice a few familiar names. Sevry, the name of the wizard in this fragment, became the name of the last King of Savaru and the hero of Chosen of Azara. That Sevry is many things, but most definitely not a wizard; I decided that name worked well for him, so I re-purposed it. Also, Perar became Perarre, the heroine of The Lost Book of Anggird, who is also most definitely not a bodyguard. So with the characters' names being used for other stories, I had pretty much decided this fragment was dead. But I still liked the idea: a lowly member of some sort of order about to set out on a journey finding out, to his dismay, that a woman has been assigned to be his guard.
Eventually, Sevry the wizard morphed into Latan the Scholar (and then the Clerk), And then I made the connection - the female bodyguard is Haveshi, from that other abandoned project. This set Latan's story firmly in the world of Chosen of Azara. When I tried to figure out the point of the journey he was going on, I realized that he had made a momentous discovery related to the conspiracy that destroyed Savaru, and he's going to present this discovery to the High Priest of the Madrinan Empire. And, ta daa, I had my stories; it was just a matter of writing them. Haveshi's story comes first in the duology. It tells how she got derailed from the path her life was on and came to be a mercenary in a conquered land that is now part of the Madrinan Empire. Then her story continues with Latan's story, when she's assigned to guard him on a journey that proves as disruptive to his life's path as the events in her story were to hers. I suggest reading Haveshi first, then Latan, but it could work the other way around, too. "The Path of Latan the Scholar" contains a spoiler for an event early on in Chosen of Azara, but the way it's presented, and the fact that the event happens so early in Chosen, it won't spoil the whole novel - I like to think of it as a teaser. Chosen of Azara also contains a spoiler for "The Path of Latan the Scholar," but that spoiler doesn't take in nearly the whole of the story. So either way, there's information given. If you're wondering what to read first, I'd say it could go either way - consider "The Path of Latan the Scholar" a teaser for Chosen of Azara, or a supplement to it. I've also posted an updated map of Estelend, showing Source Tiati, where Latan lives, in Krieth in the south part of the Madrinan Empire. If you haven't read Chosen of Azara yet, you can get an introduction to that world in "The Path of Haveshi Yellowcrow" and "The Path of Latan the Clerk," and if you've read it, you can get the scoop on that discredited historian and his female bodyguard. I hope you'll take a look, and enjoy the stories! ***Shameless self-promotion (but hey, it's my blog, it's all about self-promotion!): if you haven't read Chosen of Azara yet and want to, it's available at: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple | Sony | Diesel Smashwords | CreateSpace | All Romance eBooks Here's a peek inside Chosen of Azara. Sevry is working as a guard-for-hire, and the caravan he's guarding is about to come under attack: Sevry ignored Odigar and the confusion he was causing. The last of the largest enclosed wagons started up onto the ridge. The raiders came close enough that he could count them; there were eleven of them to his nine, plus the wagon and camel drivers. The pounding of their horses’ hooves grew louder. Sevry waited, sword drawn, his heart beating hard, his horse dancing beneath him in nervousness and excitement. At moments like this, all the times in his life when he’d waited, sword in hand, for the enemy to come blended into one. He was twelve years old again, holding his first sword, awaiting the invasion of the Royal Holding at Yiz by the Madrinan army; he was twenty-three, watching as the Madrinans approached the Convent of Azara; he was a mercenary, a guard, in countless skirmishes against countless, forgotten foes. The last wagons were still trying to get into a secure position on top of the ridge when the raiders charged up the slope and barreled into the guards without checking their horses’ speed. Sevry and the other mounted guards were forced back against the wagons by the raiders’ onslaught. Sevry’s horse slipped a few feet down the gravelly slope; he brought it under control just in time to strike at a yellow-haired raider whose sword was swinging down towards his head. A knot of fighting men on top of the ridge jolted the last wagon in line, just above Sevry. With a heavy thud, the wagon’s load of smuggled jade shifted. Sevry heard the sharp crack of the wagon’s front axle as it broke, but he didn’t have time to move out of the way. Dragging its horses with it, the wagon tumbled down the slope, crashed into Sevry and his horse, and landed on its side with Sevry’s legs trapped beneath it. Excruciating pain exploded through his legs, and his scream drowned out the noises of the fight and the cries of injured horses and men. In spite of the agony flooding his senses, he remained conscious throughout the rest of the battle. Finally, the few surviving raiders turned tail and rode away, and Sevry’s men were free to turn their attention to him. He was glad to see that none of them had fallen, though most of them were injured. They freed the horses from the broken wagon and put the poor beasts, along with Sevry’s badly-injured horse, out of their misery, unloaded the jade, then moved the wagon off of him. Bliss at the disappearance of the crushing weight nearly made Sevry forget about the pain for a moment. Speaking to each other in harsh, urgent whispers, the men carefully lifted Sevry and laid him down on some blankets. Each movement brought further waves of fresh agony. He tried to bite back his cries, but they tore their way out of him anyway. One of the men poured herbed wine into his mouth. Desperately thirsty, Sevry swallowed it. Even the strong sleeping herb in the wine barely won out over the pain. Sevry dozed uneasily, only to be jolted into consciousness by new pain as his crushed lower legs and raw, scraped arms and back were being cleaned and bandaged. Finally, his caretakers finished their tasks, and he was able to sink into undisturbed darkness. Chosen of Azara is available in ebook and paperback at:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble Apple | Sony | Diesel Smashwords | CreateSpace All Romance eBooks A few posts ago, I explained why I came to the decision to get a different cover for Chosen of Azara. It was a tough decision to make, because I love the old cover, but I really feel like the new one conveys better what the book is about, and since Sevry is the only one of the three main characters who is present in all three parts of the book, I really wanted to have him on the cover. And now, here it is! Isn't that just dreamy? :D Many thanks to Design by Katt for such beautiful art!
Stock credits: couple: Stephen Orsillo ocean: Grondin Franck Olivier http://www.dreamstime.com/ (Note: It's going to take a day or two to update the book files and get the new files and images pushed out to the different retail outlets.) Something I read recently has led me to musing on Lucie's character development in Chosen of Azara. Lucie was kind of a risky character to write, and very difficult to get right (assuming I got her right). In fantasy, young noblewomen who go off on adventures are usually spunky and rebellious and seize eagerly at the chance to run off somewhere and do exciting and dangerous things. But with Lucie, I wanted to do something different - something that is pretty much the complete opposite of almost every fantasy heroine I've ever heard of. Lucie is pretty happy with the way things are and the life she has. She does have a bit of a free-spirited streak that pushes the bounds of convention and propriety, but she is willing (though somewhat reluctantly so) to accept the reasons why one day she will need to give up the things she enjoys doing. She also has the occasional complaint about her fiance, Estefan, but she understands that in her society, marriage is about a lot more than the whims of the heart. In spite of her "eccentricities," she wants to do what's right and proper and expected of her and to be a credit to her family. She wants the handsome husband, the beautiful house, the fashionable clothes, the social standing. She is looking forward to devoting her life to raising her children and managing her household. And then the dream, the things she wants and that she's always been taught that she should want, starts to fall apart at the same time that she's presented with an alternative that, according to everything she's been raised to believe, is unthinkable, that would cost her her family, her friends, her reputation, and everything that's important to her. Lucie finds herself in a quandary: cling to what she believes is right and important, for the sake of her and her family's name and reputation and her own security, or throw everything away and take a leap into the unknown. Either option requires more courage and resolve than Lucie possesses at the beginning of her story, and a major part of Lucie's story is watching her find the courage to do what her heart insists is, in the end, the right thing to do. I knew I was taking a chance of turning off readers with a character who seems weak, who wants to be proper and conventional, who is not only indecisive but outright offended when the handsome stranger says, "Throw everything away and come on my quest with me," and who wants to cling to the life she has even as it becomes increasingly clear that that life is detrimental to her. But it's a common source of conflict and growth in the real world: the person who hates their boring cubicle job but is afraid to quit because then how will they pay the bills? Or the person who hangs on to the same circle of friends they've known since junior high even though those friends aren't progressing beyond a junior-high mentality and the person wants bigger and better things out of life but they're afraid to leave those friends behind because what if they never make any new friends? Or the woman who can't bring herself to leave a bad relationship because what will she do once she's out on her own? We see spunky, rebellious, and strong-willed all the time in fantasy. With Lucie, I wanted to start with a character who is the opposite of that and show her growth into, not necessarily spunky and rebellious, but strong-willed and courageous enough to do what her heart is telling her is the right thing to do, no matter the pressures on her from other people or the consequences to herself. So that's the character growth part of this post. As for learning curves, that's my part. The great thing about being an independent author is that you're in charge of every aspect of your book, from what you write about in the first place to the final presentation. It's amazing to have that much control, but also involves learning a lot of new things. And one of those things is book covers. Book covers (though with ebooks what you're talking about is an image that represents the book on a website or on your ereader) are a hugely important tool for drawing attention to a book. They need to be eye-catching, attractive, and convey a good sense of what the book is about. For authors who publish with traditional publishing companies, the art/marketing departments take care of all that, and sometimes they do a good job and sometimes they don't. (Caution: any and all of those links may be NSFW. Brain bleach available in aisle 2.) Either way, the author generally has little if any input into or approval over what goes on the front of their book. Independent authors have the opposite problem: It's all up to us. We have to think of the concept and then license or commission the appropriate images. And it isn't easy to think of a single image to represent your whole book. One character? Multiple characters? Just a landscape? An object? A literal representation of a scene in the book or something more general? It's mind-boggling if you aren't used to doing this, and sometimes it takes trial and error. With Chosen of Azara, I wanted something representing one or more of the characters (I very much prefer book covers with pictures of the characters), and something representing the cove of Azara or another aspect of the magic in the book. I fiddled around with pictures of various crystals and necklaces, trying to get the magical talisman that is an important object in the book, but that didn't go anywhere. Finally I settled on a picture of someone who sort of looked like Lucie, and a picture of a rocky ocean cove, and tried putting them together, with results I wasn't entirely happy with. When I went looking for a cover artist for the Daughter of the Wildings series, I came across Design by Katt and fell in love with her fantasy portraits of women. I knew I'd found just the artist I needed to turn my Chosen of Azara cover concept into something wonderful. And she did - she took my original images and concept and did a gorgeous job with them. Her rendition of Lucie captures Lucie perfectly. It's a gorgeous cover and I love it, but I started feeling like maybe my concept doesn't really represent what Chosen of Azara is really about. Lucie is only one main character of three in the book, and the main main character is actually Sevry. So I started thinking he should be on the cover. As well, just having Lucie on the cover doesn't convey the dark, angsty, romantic, adult (as in grownup, not as in porno) nature of the book - it looks more like a Young Adult book, or maybe fantasy with a chick-lit-ish twist. So, reluctantly, I came to the conclusion that my original concept was a misfire. In the meantime, as I saw more of Katt's work and as she did the lucious cover of Sarya's Song, I came to realize what a really skilled and talented artist can do with photomanipulation and digital painting. It was okay if I couldn't find a photo of two people who look exactly like my characters - the main things to look for were the basic physical type and the positioning. Everything else, hair color, hairstyle, even clothing and facial expression, can be altered. So I went browsing for stock images for a new cover and almost instantly came across the PERFECT picture to become Sevry and Lucie. I ran it by Katt and she roughed out an idea of what can be done with it, and oh my, it's going to be amazing! She's working on it even as I write this. :-D So watch this space for the new cover for Chosen of Azara. Once I've revealed it here, I'll start uploading it to the various retailers where the book is available. The old cover isn't going away, though; it will still be around on the site, because I do think it's the perfect picture of Lucie. Update 3/17: Note the new new cover for Chosen of Azara. For some reason, whenever I count up how many complete novels I've written, I always seem to forget that, buried deep in the "Old Stories" folder in my Projects folder on my computer is a complete draft of the original version of the story that eventually become Chosen of Azara. I was reading back over it yesterday (very gingerly, in the same manner that you might remove that big chunk of prickly pear that's gotten itself stuck in the sole of your sneaker, because too much contact would be painful) and was surprised at how many elements of the original story made it into Chosen of Azara (along with some that, thankfully, didn't). The seed of the idea that eventually turned into that first novel and finally matured into Chosen of Azara was an image that came into my mind one day, of a highborn young woman alone in the woods, seeing a vision of an unknown man, and then some time later, the man appears, in the flesh, at the door of her home, looking for her. The earlier story starts with that scene and goes on with the adventure from there. I also discovered that the first story also has a magical talisman that the young woman wears as a necklace, two brothers, a dubious fiance, a lost kingdom, and a king who under normal circumstances should be waaaaay past his "for best quality, use by" date. And, like Chosen of Azara, it's also set in the world of Estelend which I had begun developing probably about the same time or a little earlier. A lot of writers, especially newer ones, worry that just because one story has the same starting premise and even some more specific plot elements in common with another story, that that makes the two stories the same. You see this on the NaNoWriMo boards a lot - "Am I plagiarizing [movie or book] by having [incredibly broad and common story element] in my story?" (Someone wanted to know if they were plagiarizing George R.R. Martin by including sex in their fantasy novel.) Or, "This movie stole my plot!" Young wizards going to wizard school (A Wizard of Earthsea, anyone?) or characters who are half-human, half-god (a substantial chunk of Greek mythology) seem to cause particular concern. The answer is, No, you're not plagiarizing, No one stole your idea, There are no ideas that have absolutely never been done before. Two writers can start out with remarkably similar premises, and even some specific plot elements, and end up with very different stories. And, in fact, the SAME author can write two very different stories from the same starting point and with the same plot elements. The original "girl sees strange man in a vision in the forest" story is pretty straightforward. Girl sees vision, dude shows up, girl (accompanied by brothers and dubious fiance) goes off on adventure with mystery dude, lost kingdom, yada yada, (eventual) happy ending. I wasn't real happy with how that story came out, and in fact the girl got a name and personality change halfway through. She started out as kind of this pathetic spinster would-be-hermit, and eventually eveolved into someone more like the character of Lucie turned out to be. Aside from the main character, the story as a whole didn't do what I wanted it to do, and it certainly didn't do justice to my original idea of the man in the vision. So I turned my mind (aka the Idea-o-Tron (TM)) to learning more about the guy in the visions. Ancient king, lost kingdom... How in the world is he showing up in visions in the woods right here, right now, to this particular young lady? I started digging more into that, and that was where Sevry and his story (and the very cool time travel technique) came from. But there was more to it than that; how did the war begin, that destroyed Sevry's kingdom? Kingdom-annihilating wars don't just come out of nowhere. So that led deeper into Savaru's history, and to the story of Juzeva. By the time I'd worked out all this backstory, I realized it wasn't just backstory; the stories of Juzeva and Sevry were too closely connected to Lucie's story, and had too much important information, and were too compelling to me to just be relegated to backstory, to be worked in small chunks into the story of Lucie's adventure. So the new version of the novel started with Juzeva and became an inter-generational tale of the fall and restoration of the kingdom of Savaru. And it turned into a novel that I decided I loved, and was proud to publish (as opposed to the original version, which will remain in the privacy of my hard drive; though I'll never delete it because you never know when something from an old story can be recycled into a new one.) Okay, so Estefan from Chosen of Azara got really annoyed with me because I haven't interviewed him. And I quote, "How come that SOB who keeps trying to steal my fiancee gets an interview and I don't when I'm a hundred times more awesome than he is?" So, just to get him to leave me alone, here's Baron Estefan Mirenne. 1. What is your full name? Is there anything significant about your name? My name is Baron Estefan Lesander Danel Mirenne. The "Baron" part isn't a name; it's my title. 2. How old are you? I am 25 years old. 3. Tell us about your family. What do you like and not like about them? My father died when I was ten, and at that time I inherited his barony and his title, though I didn't take full possession of them until I reached my majority at age 20. My mother is Lady Alise Mirenne. I also have some aunts, uncles, cousins, and sisters. Petir and Pavel Barille are nearly brothers to me. After my father died I was fostered with their family, and grew up with them. A man couldn't ask for better friends. 4. Who was your first kiss, and what did you think of it? It was... No. Wait, let me think. That dairymaid with the [censored]? No. Hmm. It must have been the little blonde, um, what was she? Actually, it might have been... I'm afraid I don't remember, but I know I liked it. 5. What is your occupation? Look at question 1. I'm a Baron. 6. What are your best and worst qualities? I've won more than my share of summer tournaments the last several years. I'm good with a bow and arrow, and a dueling sword. [cue sniggering from Petir and Pavel] I also ride well, and have a fine voice, and the ladies don't seem to be able to resist me. 7. What quality do you value most in a romantic partner? I like a girl who's got a figure that gives me something to grab on to, who's lively in the hay or between the sheets and none too fussy about how and when, and... Oh, you mean... Okay. Right. I am engaged to marry Miss Lucie Barille. I grew up with her brothers and they're still my best friends. The Barilles are one of the best families in the Lower Districts, along with my own, so it's a good match. She has a nice figure and a pretty face, and stands to bring a good-sized dowry to the marriage. She's a bit empty-headed and eccentric, and not as agreeable as I would like, but my mother will take her firmly in hand and make sure she knows everything that's expected of her once we're married. And she adores me. Of course, I made the arrangements with her father before anything about our engagement was said to her, but then Baron Robart insisted I actually ask her if she wanted to marry me before he gave the final approval. Well, I knew even without asking that she would want to marry me. Why wouldn't she? But he made me ask anyway, and I have to say it was gratifying to see how flattered she was that I was personally asking her to marry me. 8. What is your favorite thing to do? I like a good hunt, a good tournament, a good beer, and a good tumble with a lively girl. 9. What is your greatest fear? I can't think of anything that I need to be afraid of. Maybe that I'll never get this new bow I just bought working right. Something's wrong with it, and I can't figure out what. 10. What is your most treasured possession? I'm fond of my sword [cue more sniggering from Petir and Pavel]. I mean the dueling sword I inherited from my father. It's old fashioned, but perfectly balanced and I've won a lot of tournament duels with it. And I've got a fine hunting horse, best in the Lower Districts, everyone says. And my manor house. It's the newest house in the Lower Districts, only being fifty years old, and has all the latest comforts and conveniences. It's the envy of the Lower Districts. |
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