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Heart of Gold
Two races—the matriarchal indigo and the patriarchal gulden—uneasily co-exist in a single shared metropolis. Nolan, a young indigo male, loves his job working in a biological lab, though he knows he will soon be called home to his family estates to marry his longtime fiancee. Everything in his life changes when he meets Kitrini, a high-caste indigo woman who has defiantly thrown her lot in with the gulden. Issues of class, culture, gender, prejudice, loyalty, and honor shape their choices when Nolan and Kitrini realize that he holds the knowledge that could save the life of the man Kitrini has always loved.
Publishing history: Published as a trade paperback in 2000 and mass market paperback in 2001.
Interesting tidbit: I love the romantic cover on the trade paperback (move your mouse over the image to the left to see it), but the mass market, with the more sf-themed cover, was more appealing to readers.
My favorite scene: The long train ride, which is both a physical and emotional journey into unfamiliar territory.
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Jenna Starborn
Jane Eyre retold as a science fiction tale. Jenna is created in the gen tanks, repudiated by the woman who commissioned her, educated in a scientific school, and employed as a nuclear technician on a remote, lonely planet. There she falls in love with the brusque and changeable owner of a mining estate—but he has hidden away a wife who is not so much mad as broken.
Publishing history: Published as a trade paperback in 2002 and mass market paperback in 2003.
Interesting tidbit: Can you tell I’ve memorized Jane Eyre? I know it so well I didn’t even have to consult the original any time I was writing my own version.
My favorite scene: Chapter Four, when Jenna and Everett Ravenbeck have a long conversation about philosophy and faith. |
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Summers at Castle Auburn
Coriel, the illegitimate daughter of a high-ranking aristocrat, spends most of her life learning herbal medicine from her grandmother, but she spends her summers with her half-sister, Elisandra, at the royal castle where Prince Bryan resides. Corie has always been secretly in love with Bryan, but she is slowly realizing that he is a spoiled, selfish, dangerous man—and that Elisandra dreads her upcoming marriage to the prince. Corie hopes that the prince’s cousin Kent will save Elisandra, while she wonders if the taciturn guard Roderick might play a bigger part in her own life.
Publishing history: Published as a trade paperback in 2001 and mass market paperback in 2002. Named to the ALA list of Best Books for Young Adults.
My favorite scene: Has to be the one where Corie frees the aliora. Though I love any scene between Corie and Kent, particularly the one at the fountain. |
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Wrapt in Crystal
Women from two very different religious sects are being murdered on the planet of Semay, and no one knows why. Sent to investigate is Cowen Drake, a special assignment officer with an intergalactic peacekeeping force—also known as a Moonchild. He finds himself drawn to the vibrant and sophisticated Jovieve, head of the joyous Triumphante sect. But at the compound of the ascetic Fideles, he finds himself falling in love with a quiet, intense woman named Laure—who risks her life so carelessly that she could easily be the killer’s
next victim.
Publishing history: Published as a trade paperback in 1999 and a mass market paperback in 2000.
Interesting tidbit: I actually wrote this book long before I sold my first novel, and then I revised it extensively for publication. I have a handful of unsold manuscripts in the Moonchild universe featuring some of my favorite characters, but the books would need a lot of work if they were ever to be in the “publishable” category.
My favorite scene: The one where Jovieve and Drake make
love in the desert. |
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The Shape-Changer’s Wife
Aubrey is a young magician who wants to learn the dangerous skills of transmogrification, so he comes to study with the renowned wizard Glyrenden. But the mysterious Glyrenden runs a household that is even stranger than he is, filled with mute and misshapen servants. One member of the household fascinates Aubrey more than all the others: the wizard’s wife, who might not be what she seems.
Publishing history: My first published novel! It came out as a mass market paperback in 1995. Winner of the Crawford Award for best first fantasy novel. Subsequently republished as a trade paperback, and available in several languages, including Japanese.
Little-known fact: This book had several incarnations. I wrote the first version in college as a poetry sequence. "The last to arrive at the Rochesters’ ball/Is the baron of Sinnisfell with his young bride..." Ten or twelve years later, I rewrote it as a novella. My agent is the one who suggested I expand it to novel length.
My favorite scene: The one where Aubrey first practices shape-changing before a pool in the forest. |
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Troubled Waters
Zoe Ardelay is living in an obscure village, mourning her father’s death, when a powerful man named Darien Serlast arrives and informs her she must travel to the royal city and become the king’s fifth bride. Numb with grief, she accompanies him to the city of Chialto, but she is able to slip away from him and hide among the city’s vagrants. She doesn’t want to marry the king, but she doesn’t know what her destiny holds.
Like everyone else in Chialto, Zoe frequently seeks guidance at the temples, pulling “random blessings” from great barrels of stamped coins; each blessing is related to one of the five elemental influences of air, water, fire, wood, and earth. Zoe is coru, a woman of water, and so was her mother and all her mother’s family; her father was sweela, a man of fire. Her brilliant father was exiled by the king at the urging of Zoe’s coru grandmother, and now Zoe wants to know why. But if she uncovers the momentous secrets of her family’s past, will her whole life change? Do her father’s secrets put the king at risk? And could Darien Serlast help her put the puzzle pieces together—if he would?
Publishing history: Published in hardback in October 2010. Paperback published in 2011. Nominated for the 2011 Mythopeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, given out by the Mythopoeic Society.
Interesting tidbit: If I ever decide to get a tattoo (still in doubt), I’m going to pick one of the random blessings for the artwork. Not sure yet which one. If anyone is wondering, I consider myself a grounded torz woman, with occasional flashes of sweela fire.
My favorite scene: The one where Zoe helps a man draw blessings for his newborn twin girls. It doesn’t do anything to advance the plot, but it’s just so sweet, and it really illustrates the power of the blessings. |
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Quatrain
The four novellas in Quatrain are set in worlds I’ve created for Archangel, Heart of Gold, Summers at Castle Auburn, and Mystic and Rider. “Flight” follows a former angel-seeker who used to be in love with the Archangel Raphael and now is determined to keep her beautiful niece from making her same mistakes. “Blood” is the story of a fierce young gulden man who comes to the city to seek his mother, whom he hasn’t seen since he was a boy and she ran away from his abusive father. In “Gold,” a crown princess escapes the hazards of war by hiding among the fairylike aliora, where she encounters an altogether different sort of danger. And in “Flame,” the mystic Senneth uses her magic to save a little girl, an act that wins her new friends but puts her own life at risk.
Publishing History: Hardcover published in 2009. Paperback published in 2010.
Interesting tidbits: While these four stories take place in radically different worlds, a lot of little details tie them together. For instance, the titles roughly correspond to the four elements; all four open with an almost identical sentence. And a few other things like that. :) If I could have managed it, I’d have made each story the same number of words, but that proved to be impossible! I loved revisiting my old worlds, and the collection was a lot of fun to write.
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