The Next Big Thing

You may have seen other authors posting this meme. I was tagged by my new excellent friend, the lovely Leigh Evans, and I thought it would be fun. Answer some questions; tag some of my author friends to do the same. Here goes!

What is the working title of your next book?
Dust and Light, the first book of the Sanctuary Duet.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
Unfinished business! My novels Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone took place in a deliciously complex world. A civil war raged in a kingdom suffering a disastrous decline in the weather. Magic was confined to a group of wealthy families - known as purebloods - who provided their services to cities, nobles, clergy, or whomever else could afford to pay for them. To nurture and preserve their magic, purebloods kept themselves detached from ordinary society and politics.  They created a mannered, disciplined subculture, linking themselves to their clients by strict contracts.

It had been great fun to develop and structure the pureblood culture – but as it happened the hero of Flesh and Spirit had spent his life running away from his pureblood family. In fact he called the life of a pureblood sorcerer “slavery with golden chains.” But his jaundiced viewpoint  left many aspects of pureblood life unexplored. When I started considering what project I wanted to work on when I finished The Daemon Prism and the Collegia Magica series, I wondered if there might have been someone else interesting raised in the pureblood social structure—someone who embraced and believed in it—and that’s when I met Lucian de Remeni-Masson.

Unlike most pureblood sorcerers, who inherited the talents of either the mother’s bloodline or the father’s, Lucian demonstrated gifts in both his mother’s artistic line and his father’s bloodline magic of history. That’s when the story took off.

What genre does your book fall under?
Mythic fantasy with a strong mystery element.  Or something like that.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Oh, I never do this – or if I do, I don’t tell. I’ve found that my readers have such widely varying images of my characters, so I don’t like to skew them too much. The lesson came clear when I had readers casting Seyonne, the hero of Transformation, with everyone from a young Daniel Day Lewis to Orlando Bloom! Suffice it to say that Lucian is a lean, good-looking young man of twenty six with typical pureblood features: dark, straight hair, aquiline nose, and dusky skin.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Maybe I can distill it into three. Lucian de Remeni, pureblood sorcerer with a bent for portraiture, has grown up in wealth, privilege, self-discipline, and the conviction that his beloved family’s magical talents are the gods’ gift to a troubled kingdom. But a family tragedy begins a spiraling downfall that sweeps the young sorcerer into a life he had never imagined. Banished to the crude society of a bustling necropolis, Lucian’s task of becomes the key in two murder investigations which threaten to upend the war for Navronne’s crown and unravel the very foundations of pureblood life.

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Before I go on, I want to tag those who are next up on this branch of The Next Big Thing.

Diana Pharaoh Francis is the author of two fantasy series – the Path series and the Crosspointe Chronicles – and the fabulous Horngate Witches urban fantasy series.  I’m jealous when I report that not only does she write exciting adventures, but she is also a professor of English at the University of Montana, rider of horses, wife, mom, and exceptionally fun person to hang out with at a science fiction convention.  You have never met a professor like Di!

Cindi Myers has authored more than forty novels, spanning romance, historical, western, and women’s fiction.  Her work is consistently excellent, and she is the most focused and productive writer I know.  I go hang out with her on mountain retreats just hoping to absorb some of her professionalism.  Again, it just isn’t fair that she’s gorgeous, generous, and a great teacher.

Mindy Klasky is the author of fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal chick-lit novels, and under her alter ego, Morgan Keyes, a fabulous new YA fantasy called Darkbeast.  A reformed lawyer and law librarian, Mindy sat alongside me on our first ever convention panel – My First Novel at the 2000 Chicago WorldCon.  Our first books had come out one month apart, from the same publisher, and as women of other professions, we bonded immediately.  Now with twenty-eight novels between us, I guess our panel was a success - our friendship certainly is!

Compared to these three, Linda Joffe Hull is just a newbie.  But her first novel, The Big Bang will likely leave all of us genre writers in the dust. Library Journal describes it as "a fun, sexy suburban soap opera with a touch of mystery." I’ve known this book since it was a baby, and believe me it is like nothing else out there.  Neither is Linda, who is also fun, smart, and sexy!

 

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And now back to the NBT questions:  

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I've worked with agent Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency from my first sale thirteen years ago. Dust and Light will be published in 2014 by New American Library/Roc Books.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Knowing how unlikely it is that I'll reach the end of the story before my deadline of June 2013, it will have taken me a year and a half. I would love to think I could be a third of the way into the second (as yet untitled) volume of the duology by that time, but I'm not placing any bets.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? My books have been compared to those of Robin Hobb, Guy Gavriel Kay, Mary Stewart, and Lynn Flewelling.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
My favorite authors of my favorite kinds of stories - murder mysteries, historical political intrigues, and world myths. The heart of Dust and Light is the interweaving of two mysteries - the strangling death of a young street urchin in the royal city and the savage massacre of a wealthy family by rampaging fanatics. The resolution of these mysteries leads my hero to dangerous discoveries about the fundamental nature of pureblood magic in Navronne.

What else about the book might pique the reader's interest? These books are not a sequel, but a parallel story to Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone, involving entirely new characters. (Dust and Light actually begins a bit more than a year earlier than Valen's story.) One will be able to read either pair first. But for those who've already read the Lighthouse books, there will be some "Easter eggs" – references to some old friends and places. I think that will be fun. Read more of this post!

Autumn in Review - September

Time to wake up this blog! I just sat up and realized it's Thanksgiving - well no, that's already passed. I think I'll start with a quick review of what's been happening this year. Out of order and higgledy-piggledy, but here goes. Let's start with September...

On one weekend,  I took a Sunday hike with kids up to Lake Isabelle in the Brainard Lake Recreation Area.  Our terrible drought here in Colorado was made visible when we arrived at the lake.  Not fire damage, thank goodness, but just dry.  Most of the lake just wasn’t there.  Here’s what we saw on a glorious autumn day.  Note the barren strip around the current water line -a beach where there shouldn't be one.   Here’s a view of the same lake in a greener year.  We did have a good time stomping on the wooden bridges along our hike to make sure no trolls came up to grab us.  None did.  Whew!

 


The Colorado Gold Writers Conference, sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers is always a September highlight. The workshops are great, but I find myself sitting for a great deal of the conference hours in the large, open, and most welcoming bar/lobby of the Denver Renaissance hotel. It’s a great time and place to catch up with writer-friends from all over the region, as well as meet new ones. I gave a morning Master class on characterization, as well as a workshop on writing first person. I also did an hour's discussion with authors Warren Hammond and Mackay Wood on violence in fiction – why an author may choose to use it, and what we considered our own boundaries and favorite techniques for writing violent scenes. I also had to give a kick-off speech, seeing as how the members of RMFW had voted me in as their 2012 Writer of the Year. It is a great honor, and I was treated royally.

What I Was Working On: workshops for Colorado Gold, proof pages for The Daemon Prism mass market, the New Boo, the Obama campaign

What We Were Watching: Merlin, Mad Men, Bronco football

More about the New Book soon.  Watch for The Next Big Thing. Read more of this post!

WorldCon!

This year's World Science Fiction Convention is at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago over Labor Day weekend - Thursday, August 30 through Monday September 3. It's always fun to visit this vibrant city (especially since I have kids in the area.

But WorldCon itself is amazing. Five days of non-stop programming, sometimes 25 things going on at once. There are panels on every conceivable fantasy/sf-related topic - writing, art, "the literature", film and TV, comics, and so on - as well as actual gaming from Risk or Magic, the Gathering to the latest RPGs, music, dancing, costuming and the ultimate Masquerade, an art show and art auction, the Hugo Awards, book dealers and other vendors selling art, jewelry, costumes, and everything else. Guest writers like me, editors, agents, reviewers, and artists staff the panels, hoping to get face to face with readers. I've got a busy schedule this year.

Here's the list...

• Thursday, Aug 30, 4:30pm: Autographing 
• Friday, Aug 31, 12 noon: panel on Writing Beyond the First Two Pages 
• Friday, Aug 31, 3pm: BroadUniverse Rapidfire Reading - 17 readers in an hour and a half - FUN! Saturday, Sept 1, 10:30am: panel on Writing Vivid Characters 
• Saturday, Sept 1, 3pm: ANOTHER panel on Writing Vivid Characters(Don't ask me! But I like the topic.) 
• Sunday, Sept 2, 9:30am: Reading - PLEASE COME! Depending on the audience, I might be prevailed upon to read from the new book... 
• Sunday, Sept 2, 10:30am: Kaffeeflatsch - Sign up on the list and come - we can talk about anything you like!
I've some prep to do. Four-minute reading for BroadUniverse, full reading for Sunday. Considering topics for the Character panel that I am supposed to moderate and thoughtful comments for the others. All good things. Hope to see lots of you there.

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Writing DIfferences

Somewhere, someone once said, Write what you know. I hate that phrase. For many years, I took that to mean Write things that you’ve personally experienced. No one wanted to read about my life – teacher, software engineer, student, wife, mom. Quite ordinary and boring to those looking for adventure. I kept reading.

Jump ahead a few decades. I’d read a few thousand books by now and internalized that not every author had experienced everything in his or her stories, not when someone could make me believe hobbits existed, or that this world was only a shadow of an idealized place called Amber. These writers were fiction writers. It was their job to make me believe in the reality – and yes, the underlying truth of their story. When I took up fiction writing as a hobby, I wasn’t sure I could instill that same sense of belief in other people. But the more I worked at it, the more I learned that I could - by thinking hard, by working hard to know what I was talking about, by considering what it might be like to live in a culture or situation or a profession far from my own experience.

Yet I still heard people saying don’t. Don’t try to write people of a different gender. I got past this one, too. I was not only writing from the point of view of two characters who were warriors, but they both happened to be men. I had certainly observed plenty of men! I thought hard about how their feelings or reactions might be their own, not mine. I worked hard to make their voices, concerns, and behavior right for their characters and the story. And male readers told me I did just fine.

And then I wrote from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy (later sixteen-year-old) and that worked, as well. (It helped that I lived in a house with one - male - spouse and three sons!)

Still, of course, there were other nay-saying voices out there in the aether: Don’t try to write people of a different color or sexual orientation or a disability you don’t live with. How could you possibly know? How could you possibly understand? How could you possibly get it right when you are an American, heterosexual woman of Irish heritage who grew up in the southwest US in the 20th century without anything one would label a disability (except maybe painful shyness)?

But I decided that if I could write men convincingly, and if I could write two very different warriors convincingly when I had no combat training or experience, then I ought to be able to write these things too. I am fiction writer, and I use knowledge, imagination, logic, and reason to make my characters’ behavior and experiences true to the human experience as it exists in the fictional worlds I create, and close enough to the human experience in this world that my readers find them believable and identifiable.

But when the tides of the storyline in one of my series swept my brooding, violent sorcerer hero into blindness, I did feel trepidation. This was new territory. I very, very much wanted to get it right, to avoid TV/film/fictional cliches, to avoid any hint of paternalism or pandering or any other thing that might ruin the story for any reader. And yet I didn’t hesitate. It was the right thing for the story, which was about all about seeing – seeing the truth of magic in a world where it was dying, seeing the truth of a wicked conspiracy, seeing the truth of oneself and of those you could not believe might find you worthy of love or compassion. It was only fitting that this man face the loss of the thing that he valued above all things – the sight that enabled him to work the most complex forms of magic. So how was I going to do this right?

Part of my challenge was physical – how does a man cope with blindness in a society comparable to the early 17th century? Part was emotional – how does a man of a passionate, volatile nature react to an abrupt change that he can only view as devastating? Note that this is his view, not my own—a critical distinction when dealing with such topics. My aim was not to preach about how loss of sight is not a “disability” but just another way of dealing with the world, but to relate this man’s feelings about and reactions to what had happened to him. And part of my challenge was authorial – how do I communicate a vivid sense of a world without using visual images?

So how did I approach it?
 

First: Research
The internet is our friend. I read medical information about the mechanisms of sight and its loss. More importantly, I found forums and blogs by the newly blind giving personal perspectives – emotional, physical, and how those affected day-to-day life. It didn’t matter that it was 21st century information. I was accustomed to translating human experiences to a less techno-savy century.

Second: Write
I never research too much before I begin writing. Knowing how the story unfolds tells me what I need to focus on in research. As I wrote, I considered every word, phrase, scene, and situation from this perspective.

Third: Network
I was fortunate to know a fellow writer who has been losing her sight for many years. I asked if she would read my early chapters and give me her opinion, as I was trying to get it right. She was pleased to be asked. Not only did she give me a few pointers, but gave me a most invaluable reference – a man who had lost his sight profoundly and abruptly at very near the same age as my sorcerer. He was delighted to help and, as it happened, had done so for other writers. Not only did he vet my chapters (and say I’d done a decent job!!) but answered my every question and offered me some wholly unexpected insights. I wish I could have used everything he gave me! But, as always, one can’t burden the story with all the delicious research.

Hard thinking. First-hand information. Respect. Focusing on the story. I think these things got me through. The result is found in my novel, The Daemon Prism, the third (and final) novel of the Collegia Magica.


I wrote this originally for a series on Bookworm Blues. Check it out. Read more of this post!

A feast for the eyes - and a good story, too

Oscar night. Not much point in watching since we hadn't seen very many of the films. And so often, it seems as if lots of nominated films are just not to our taste, no matter how well made or well acted. I mean, "No Country for Old Men" was a fabulous piece of film-making, but I didn't like anyone in the story. That's a necessity for me, whether in films or books (and something I strive to provide my own readers - characters...people...to care about.)

So instead of watching the Oscar show - or more episodes of Burn Notice to which we are currently addicted (yes, some very complicated characters to care about) - we went to the second run cinema and saw "Hugo."

First, yes, characters to care about - a whole cast of them in the first minute of the film as the camera leads you on a chase through a train station in 1930s' Paris. The station guard with his leg brace, the woman with the dog and her portly suitor, the man in the toy shop, the cheery flower seller, the musicians, and many more, each sketched as distinctly as a master writer like Dick Francis can do in a few words. And then the eyes peering through the 4 in the great clock. The story question right there in front of you. Whose eyes and why from inside the clock?

Well done. It was a nice story. Well performed for the most part. About loss and memory. About the magic of...story! But what made the film step into magic for me was
not the story but the language of its composition.


The visual experience. The deep moody colors of the era. The deep stairways and the clicking gears and mechanics of the great clockworks. The shining eyes of the two young friends. The snow. The magical, glowing view of the city at night. The lovely precision of the small mechanical man - the automaton left by a loving father to a lonely son, which brings a mystery (and you know how I love mystery) to the tale. And I have to say that for the first time in my experience 3D really added something special.

Faults? Yes. It gets a bit wordy in ways it doesn't need to. (Don't hammer me over the head by saying things that are transmitted so beautifully by action - another word to the wise author!) A few too many shots of the young Hugo's glistening eyes. (Yes repetition is good, but a wise author will take out one too many.) I wonder if children (and there were many in the theater) love the film as much as adults seem to.

Summing up, a most enjoyable two hours.
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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier...Fine

I have always loved spy novels. Cold War novels by John le Carre and Len Deighton. The stories about the Enigma cipher (WWII). Ken Follett wrote some good ones before he fell into historical triumph with Pillars of the Earth. The James Bond books were not so cartoonish as the films, but they weren't of this same gritty, realistic ilk. Most of the these I'm referring to weren't made into successful single films because they were too complex for a two-hour adaptation. BBC did a wonderful miniseries version of John le Carre's Smiley's People, one of the best of the genre. But films??

Now here comes Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a 2011 sleeper that, from the look of the theater today, no one has heard about. You might have seen a mention in the Oscar nominations for Gary Oldman (yes, Sirius Black! and many other wonderful portrayals). And well deserved!

Oldman plays George Smiley, the aging MI-5 operative, put out to pasture after a disastrous operation gets an operative killed, and brings down George's mentor Control, the head of "the Circus" as the spy agency is called here. But a young agent (an excellent Benedict Cumberbatch of the new Masterpieces Sherlock series) has gotten wind of a rumor that could bring down the increasingly marginalized agency. Someone in the inner circle is a mole - a tool of the Russian spymaster known as Karla.

The file evokes the gritty (yes that word again) shadowy world of the 70s cold war. Hot wars were fought through surrogates, but the cold war was fought on the wet streets of East Berlin and Paris...and Budapest...and in the concrete block offices of London, each side hunting for intelligence - the kind that could only come through defectors or agents in place. Dangerous business. No flashy car chases. And in those days, no dazzling sensors or cell phones or laser beams or Mission Impossible impossibilities.

Oldman's performance is beautifully nuanced. He is a taciturn man. Serious, intellectual, but hopelessly enamored of a wife who is unfaithful. Hearing the reliable report of a mole--a double agent--in the highest echelon of his kingdom's secret service--men he has worked with--grieves him, yet he never says a word to convey it. A masterful performance. And the film spins back and forth in time and place, yet never needs labels to tell us when we are looking at a Christmas party in happier times for the agency or when we are in Budapest watching the fateful meeting and murder or when we are seeing the patient, dogged George unraveling a case for the ages. No being lowered from the roof, no pressure sensors, no leaps, just good work, and a great story. Loved it.

A great cast as well besides Oldman and Cumberbatch: John Hurt, Colin Firth, Ciaren Hinds, and a really excellent Tom Hardy
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Good news!

There are many kinds of good news an author can receive: good reviews, positive reader comments, new contracts, new translation agreements, award news, and so forth. But on Friday, I heard two of the best lines an author can hear.

News the first. We've had to go back to press on the new book. That is, the print version of The Daemon Prism has outsold expectations in the first two weeks.


News the second. We're taking Transformation back to press. Copies should be available by the end of the month.



This is a tough publishing environment. No one can really predict the impact of electronic publishing on a new release. The percentage of a new release bought in electronic form is increasing dramatically with every year that goes by. I'll bet thousands of readers are sporting new Kindles or Nooks since the holidays. Yes, authors get paid - in my case fairly equally - for both print and electronic books. But I still hold that new readers are more likely to find my books by running across them in bookstores. Either the cover art or the back cover blurb might attract them, or they will recall mention of my work by reviewers or my wonderful readers on Facebook or book blogs or at parties or writers events. It is always nice to exceed expectations.

As for backlist... Many of you notices that my very first published book Transformation has been pretty scarce for most of the last year. It is awful when the last two books in a series are available and the first one is not. Certainly an author's nightmare! But warehousing books is a huge expense for publishers and everyone is waiting to see if e-books really do replace the mass market paperback, especially for older works. Evidently my publisher has decided that the demand for Transformation is such that they can't wait and see any more. Hooray for that! Transformation holds a special place in my list. It's where many of my readers started out on a journey that's taken us all to some deeper and darker places.

So anyway, thanks to all of you out there for encouraging my publisher to this point of view! Now back to work on something new.


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Come talk with me and win books!

Come join me on Thursday, January 12, at noon CST for a conversation about The Daemon Prism - and any of my books - at Bitten by Books. It's part of a five-author book launch event, with many giveaways, contests, and a grand prize awarded at the end of the week that includes $200 worth of book gift cards, books, and goodies. Lots of ways to get extra entries into the contests. I've never done one of these before, and it's a bit daunting.

I'll also have a blog post up about The Five Things a Kind Author Should Never Do to a Fantasy Hero - and you know I can tell you about that. You might recognize a few incidents...

UPDATE: Here is the actual Bitten by Books link to the live conversation!

So which autographed books am I giving away?

1. The Spirit Lens


2. Son of Avonar


3. Flesh and Spirit


4. Song of the Beast

Don't let me hang out alone! And I would love for one of my readers to win the grand prize. I'll be checking for questions into the evening hours, as well. See you there!


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Release Day!

Four years after writing the first page of The Spirit Lens, the third and final novel of the Collegia Magica, The Daemon Prism, appears on bookstore shelves and online ebook lists today. What a ride!

I poured a lot of my favorite ideas into this series, which began with a simple double-agent, murder mystery investigation, and ended up in an entangling adventure tale of magic, love, destiny, faith, death, life, and the order of nature. (Somehow my stories just grow!) I took on a risky business of multiple narrators again, knowing that if people grew attached to my quietly confident, always logical librarian, Portier, as I hoped, they might have trouble switching to my shy insecure young heroine Anne. By the time I got to The Daemon Prism, I trusted that readers would love to get inside the crusty, violent Dante's head and see what he had been thinking all along. I know it was fun for me! Of course the demands of the story, said that Anne's keen observations had to be called into service again, and I felt the need to give a brief closure to two other characters as we raced to the ending.

Now that the series is done, what do I like the best about it? The characters and their relationships. I was so pleased at how they developed. Both Portier and Anne hid themselves for a long time. Dante and Ilario were more...overt...about their personalities. I loved the exposure of the Sabrian world in the first book, the court intrigue of the second, and the wide-ranging and yet very "interior" adventure of the third.

To celebrate this launch I'm going to take off for the mountains and start working on a new project. There will also be EVENTS - which I will post about later. As every author, I need my readers to let people know if you like the books. Post reviews. Spread the word.

So, on to the book itself... What's up with the uneasy alliance formed at the end of The Soul Mirror?
Here's a bit of a teaser, the opening paragraphs of The Daemon Prism...



30 Ocet, 883rd Year of the Sabrian Realm, sunset
Pradoverde

"Stop right there!" I bellowed. My student’s resolute little inhalation signaled her ready to bind her first complex spell. I resisted the temptation to shatter or repair the well-structured but ill-conceived little charm. She had to learn.

Mercifully, she was well disciplined. Though her will tugged fiercely against mine, she obeyed.

"Concentrate. Look deeper. A hundred thousand streams in Sabria comprise water, rocks, willows, and trout. But to draw on this stream's keirna - its essence - you must unearth the secrets that make it unique. You're no child swatting a fly. Misjudgment could drown us . . . or bury us . . . or turn yon pasture into a swamp." In this case, likely all of them and worse.

She knelt along the stream bank, not half a metre from my boots. Having spent most of every day for two years in her presence, I could sense her every muscle twitch, accurate signals for divining her level of confidence. It had taken her a very long time to prepare for this step, and she was very sure of herself. She hated mistakes.

"There’s nothing wrong with it," she said after a few moments' contemplation. "Sealing the snag will just divert the water around the end of it, digging out the far bank a little more. I'm not blocking the water flow completely. There's plenty of leeway."

She readied herself again.

"No!" I drove the heel of my staff into the rocky streambed.

She jerked but held her ground, not yanking her hand from the water. It wasn't so easy to startle her into attendance anymore. So I assaulted her weakness with words. "Have you learned nothing? There's mud between the rocks. What color is it? What consistency? Does the sun reveal glints of metal in it? What would that tell you of the stream's origins and use? You're a woman of science. Where is its source? Has its course evolved as nature prescribes or has it been purposely altered? Your friend Simon provided you the Pradoverde land grants. If you'd studied them with half a mind, you'd know this land was once a disputed boundary between two blood families. Why?"

"None of those things have to do with a snag of twigs formed this past summer." She was so sure. So calm.

"Wrong! If you’d studied the legends of the Fremoline outcrops, where our stream has its source, you’d know there were persistent tales of gold deposits - "

"There are no gold deposits anywhere in the demesne of Louvel." I could imagine her rolling her eyes. "The rocks are almost entirely limestone. The rumors provide nothing useful to weave into the spellwork."

Breaking her prim, scholarly ways of thinking had been my most difficult challenge. It was why I had chosen this particular exercise on this particular day.

I repeated my probe of the streambed. Again, and then again, moving upstream until the muffled jar of metal shivered my staff and the razored sting of long-bound enchantment flowed up my arm. The virulence of the spell threatened to dissolve the bone. But I held the staff in place and tapped it sharply with my forefinger, my signal that she should touch it, too. She had to feel the magnitude of her error.

Her discipline held. A gurgle out of place in the rhythmic bubbling of the stream told me she’d withdrawn her hand from the water. A quiet chink, a scuff of dirt, and the release of pent power said she'd kicked aside the length of slender chain she'd laid out for her spell enclosure. Determined steps and a brush of skirts brought her to my side.

"If you’d looked deeper," I said, cooler now I'd snared her full attention, "you'd have found a bronze casket buried here at the seventh metre past the dogleg bend - the corner of the disputed territory. This is how the one faction, intending to ensure that they alone could harvest these rumored riches, shifted the streambed to fit their desired boundary."

I could not see her face any better than I could see anything else in this daemon-blasted world. Yet, even had I not smelled her soap-scented sweat or heard the tight hiss of her annoyance, I’d have known her in the moment she laid her finger on the carved hornbeam of my ancille - the moment the spells bound into my staff became instantly more useful, more lethal, faster, sharper, swollen from the inborn power she brought to any working. One would have to plumb the tangled depths of a forest's roots or the moldered residue of an ancient battleground to match Anne de Vernase's potential for magic. That she possessed a mind and will fully capable of wielding such power made her reluctance to take hold of it inexcusable . . .

You can find a larger excerpt of The Daemon Prism on my website.

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