
RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
LA GUERRE DE LONEN, the French translation of LONEN’S WAR, the first in my six-book fantasy romance series, Sorcerous Moons, is live! I’m eager to see how my University French holds up to attempting a read.
If you’re in the Albuquerque or greater New Mexico area, I’ll be signing copies of THE ORCHID THRONE on Saturday, October 5, at 4pm at Page 1 Books. Here’s a nice write-up of the upcoming event.
Finally, SEASONS OF SORCERY is on sale for only $2.49! (Down from $6.99.) Great time to grab a copy of this amazing Fantasy Anthology.
At the SFF Seven this week, we’re discussing author fan groups – whether we have them, like them, how they work, and we’re interested in what the readers think about them. Do you belong to any fan groups and what do you like about them, which are your favorites and why? Come on over to weigh in!
And we have the cover for LONEN’S REIGN! The sixth and final book in the Sorcerous Moons series will release on March 20, 2019. Woo hoo and whew!
I’m so glad to finally tie up this series, as I know many of you are, too, having waited so long. I had a lot of fun writing this final battle and hooking back to some of the images and challenges from the very first book, LONEN’S WAR. So, even though I think of the series as being mostly about Oria, it seemed right to put Lonen – and Buttercup! – front and center for this final book.
Oria and Chuffta are there, too. Can you spot them?
A Looming Threat
The sorceress Oria has finally come into her own—able to wield the power of her birthright and secure in the marriage she once believed would bring her only misery. But the past she escaped still chases her, and the certainty of war promises to destroy everything she’s fought to have.
An Impossible War
Once before Lonen led an army in a desperate attempt to stop the powerfully murderous sorcerers of Bára—and he nearly lost everything. Now he must return to the battlefield that took the lives of so many of his people. Only this time he has more to risk than ever.
The Final Conflict
With guile, determination—and unexpected allies—Oria and Lonen return to the place where it all began… and only hope that it won’t also be the end of them.
A little tease of the LONEN’S REIGN cover, which we’ll be revealing in my newsletter sometime in the next 24-48 hours. If you want to subscribe, the link is here.
Our topic at the SFF Seven is what playlist or poetry we use for inspiration. Come on over to learn about mine.
I got to be on the SFF Marketing Podcast, which is a weekly podcast I really enjoy, with real life discussions of authors’ careers, processes, and what they do to spread the word about their books. As I’m still deep into finishing LONEN’S REIGN, the last Sorcerous Moons book, I’m just going to pop the link for that podcast here, and get back to work.
Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is A Little Love For Your Backlist: Promo/Blurb from one of your previously published books. Come on over for mine.
I received a very interesting set of questions on Facebook from a reader who just finished reading WARRIOR OF THE WORLD. They’re such good questions that they deserve a thoughtful answer, so I decided to do that here. I hope she doesn’t mind!
She said:
…one of the things that I feel like you do extremely well is create empathy for both “sides” of a war/ disagreement/conflict. In art, as in life I see most often empathy/sympathy being created with blame/making the other side the “bad guy”, etc. You seem to…skip that part? So this is a two part question:
1. Do you find yourself able to do that within your own life? (like are you less of a blamer, more of a solution finder – I’m working so so so hard on that with my kids and am interested in the HOW of it)
2. And two, HOW do you do it, first within yourself, and then secondarily, how do you WRITE it so that I, as a reader, don’t find myself coming down overly hard on one side – how do you make the gray the overwhelming tone, rather than the black and white?
So, here are my answers, plus a few more thoughts.
Looking at the story in WARRIOR OF THE WORLD, part of what I wanted to get was the female perspective on war. I think a whole lot of war – both in real life and in fiction – tends to be driven by male aggression. It’s not across the board, but I think it’s a strong driver, particularly in this century when so many wars have been driven by political ambitions and corporations wanting to monopolize resources. The war pending in this book is about controlling scarce resources, with those on the lean end wanting to attack those with plenty. The women in the book point out that just because one arm of a society is aggressive, however, doesn’t mean that everyone in that culture feels the same. A large part of any society gets dragged along with whatever the leaders decide – and often those being dragged along are women, children, the elderly, and those unable or unwilling to be warriors, for whatever reason. I think this was maybe different in other wars. I like to imagine the women of the American Revolutionary War and Civil War were much more involved because those were conflicts that directly impacted daily living and quality of life.
Now, men often criticize women writers for focusing on what they perceive as minutiae. Naturally, however, the person who sits down at table to consume a meal has a very different perspective than the person responsible for putting three nutritious meals on that table every day. This doesn’t have to fall out along gender lines, but it often does, particularly in the last century. When you have pretty much one gender in another country fighting a war and the other back at home, then you know which one is thinking about the daily minutiae of living. So, in this story, I wanted to deliberately draw that out and have the women of the family say, “Hey, who are you raging at? Do you think the babies and eldsters want to attack you?” They’re taking that position of recognizing the other’s story.
This is something that’s important to me as a person and as a writer, which is part of why I love the trope of enemies-to-lovers. That’s part of why I put LONEN’S WAR at the top, though I also explored similar themes in THE MARK OF THE TALA. That LONEN’S WAR cover encapsulates a great deal of that theme for me – of confronting the supposedly monstrous enemy and coming to not only understand them, but to love them. That whole Sorcerous Moons series is about two warring cultures coming together in part by learning each other’s stories.
How’s that for a long answer?
Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is “If you were going to write fan fiction, what show/characters/etc would you write?” Come on over for my confession.