Coming Soon…

In the Pipeline

Scheduled for release:

House of Shadows

House of Shadows is in a different world from the Griffin trilogy. It’s another adult fantasy. I enjoyed writing it, although it was complicated in some ways. I mean, I started to try to write a story three times with three different main characters, couldn’t choose which I liked best, and wound up keeping them all and weaving them together. The plot arose simply from a desire to keep all the main characters and the need to wrap a coherent story around them all.  It all worked beautifully in the end, but it wasn’t easy.

So far, House of Shadows is the only story I’ve written where I went off in the wrong direction at the climactic scene and had to stop, reconsider, erase 40 pages, and start over. It worked out much better after that.

House of Shadows is self-contained, but I have a sequel in my head, so we’ll see.

Work in Progress

A werewolf book!   Sort of! Tentatively called BLACK DOG.

This is absolutely the fault of Patricia Briggs, who made me a werewolf fan despite myself.  But in fact my werewolves aren’t AT ALL like hers — they’re not even called werewolves.

When I sent the first 70 pages of this manuscript to my agent, her comment was, “Great!  A fresh new take on werewolves!”  This made me happy.  Then, when she saw the finished manuscript, she said it was “claustrophobically intense”, which sounds even better.  Now it’s just a waiting game as she sends it out and we wait to hear back from editors . . . writing on spec is definitely more stressful than writing for a contract.  I think it will sell!

Meanwhile, I’ve also finished a new YA fantasy . . . well, with SF things around the edges . . . that I’m tentatively calling THE MOUNTAIN OF KEPT MEMORY. I think it turned out pretty well . . . my agent has it now.

AND I’ve got this great idea for a story set in a kinda-sorta alternate Ottoman Empire, and I just discovered Nina Kiriki Hoffman and after reading all of her books one after another, I’ve got a brand-new urge to write a contemporary fantasy.  Plus I’ve got about fifty pages of a couple of different stories, any of which I could pick up again.

So I don’t think I’ll be running out of stuff to do any time soon.

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all happened to you, and afterwards it all belongs to you.” – Ernest Hemingway, An Old Newsman Writes