THE ISLES OF GLORY TRILOGY
THE AWARE       9780732276508
GILFEATHER     9780732276515
THE TAINTED    9780732276522

THE MIRAGE MAKERS TRILOGY
THE HEART OF THE MIRAGE        9780732281984
THE SHADOW OF TYR                     9780732281991
THE SONG OF THE SHIVER BARRENS  9780732282004


THE WATERGIVERS TRILOGY
THE LAST STORMLORD     9780732289294
STORMLORD RISING          9780732289300
STORMLORD’S EXILE         9780732289317

My last trilogy, THE FORSAKEN LANDS is published in Australia and worldwide by Hachette ORBIT, and if you can’t find it on the shelves in your local bookstore, ask them to get it in for you. (The Lascar’s Dagger, Dagger’s Path and The Fall of the Dagger.)

TWO THINGS:


The Fall of the Dagger, the third and last book of The Forsaken Lands trilogy, now has a set publication date: 19th April 2016 (USA) and 21st April 2016 (UK). 


And the MIRAGE MAKERS trilogy is now available in ebook form in the USA, all three books. Start with the first: THE HEART OF THE MIRAGE.

…will be on 17th-21st August, just  couple of more days. I wish I could be there, but I couldn’t afford it. Instead I sent a bit of myself.

Last year, the con was in Melbourne and I did go. And during the course of the con I won a book in the Brotherhood Without Banners Charity Raffle.

Don’t know who the Brotherhood are? Well, I can tell you they run GREAT con parties, but they are a lot more than that.  This is a brief descrition from their website:

The Brotherhood Without Banners is a George RR Martin fan group. Our primary mission is to bring together fans of GRRM’s writing for fun and discussion. Oh, and parties. Membership is open to everyone who is a fan of GRRM…

You can read lots more at the website.

Last year they had a whole stack of great books from authors as prizes in the charity raffle, but I remarked to one of the organisers that there wasn’t a single book there written by a woman.  Now, as they are a great bunch of guys who really care about George R.R. Martin, about SF in general, and the reputation of the Brotherhood, they took my comment to heart. So this year, there is — at the very least — one woman writer represented in the raffle prizes! There is a complete set of the Mirage Makers trilogy, which has never been available for sale in the USA.

This year the raffle is in support of the Joplin tornado disaster relief fund. So if you are at Worldcon, support the raffle! You ever know what you might win!

The other day I noted a vote going on over at the ASIF site (Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus). It was to find the most popular series by an Oz author. They selected all the authors who have a completed trilogy/series, took one of those and asked readers to vote. Looking at it, I was thinking to myself I’d be hard put to choose which one – when the authors were folk like Karen Miller, Sara Douglass, Juliet Marillier, Jennifer Fallon, Trudi Canavan and so on… My God, with a line-up like that, how on earth could one choose? As my Mirage Makers was also up there, I didn’t vote, but quite frankly, I would not have known which to pick.

Anyway, the winner was Sean Williams’ Books of the Cataclysm, and as he is one of Australia’s most talented SF writers, that was no surprise. What did astonish me was that Mirage Makers was second. Wow. Thank you all those that voted for it.

I may be officially astonished, but today I am also officially one very contented author.

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• Shadow of Tyr has gone to reprint in UK.
• Having attracted the attention of 2 separate publishers, the Mirage Makers trilogy has had an offer that I am accepting for foreign language rights. Shan’t say any more because I haven’t signed on the dotted line yet. This is the second foreign language for the trilogy (the other was for French rights)
• I heard some nice news from Orbit US about publicity for The Last Stormlord, which I’ll tell you about closer to the date.
• Had some fabulous news from Orbit UK also about The Last Stormlord, which I’ll also tell you about later. Over the moon about this one. *Does little dance.*
• HarperCollins Australia has submitted The Last Stormlord for the David Gemmell Legend Award.
• Have had the first signs of an interest re The Last Stormlord for foreign language rights from two different countries. Nothing may come of these, but it’s never happened so early before.
• And the whiz of a writer Karen Miller booked our room for World Aussicon in September. That’s right – we are room mates again. Yay!!

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One of the nice things about being a HarperVoyager Oz author is that they tend to keep books in print. The last two books of the Mirage Makers have just gone to yet another reprint, and here’s what they sent to me…

And then Orbit UK sent me their catalogue for the Spring and Summer 2010, and I got my first glimpse of Larry Rostant’s cover for Stormlord Rising. And the rather flattering blurb stuff too…*g*

The end bit reads: The trilogy is “a gripping tale of war and deprivation reaching from the highest throne room to a shallow grave in the sands. This is an epic tale of survival wrapped in politics and and intrigue. Brent Weeks meets Dune in this coming-of-age adventure fantasy set in a desert world where water is the only currency.“

Hmm. I’ll let you readers be the judge of that. Although I will say that this second book of the trilogy is as much the story of Rainlord Ryka Feldspar – who is in her thirties! – as that of the two young protagonists, Terelle and Shale.

I think what excites me about this book is that several people have told me they think it tops the first book, and is the best thing I have written yet. As it is book number nine of mine to be published, I love the idea of that. I strive to improve all the time…

Here: on amazon

They are offering a set of the 3 books of The Mirage Makers for stg 17.97 (or 5.99 each). Now that’s a bargain. If you haven’t read them, go buy. Remember the first and the third were shortlisted for the best fantasy novel of the year in Oz.

Jennifer Fallon has pointed out that Harper Collins Australia website now has the”browse inside the book” facility. You can now take a peek inside each of the Mirage Maker titles here by clicking on the title of each book. Be warned though, the pages they offer you are not entirely consecutive – they are the first 3 pages of each chapter! Enough, I guess, for you to decide whether you will like the story. One thing for sure, there are a lot more pages there than you get with Amazon.

They have not done the same thing yet for the Isles of Glory, although you can read extracts of The Aware and The Tainted.

[This is a continuation from the post below.]

It’s interesting to see how you create your worlds; do you have a method of managing them? Do you lay out the world and story-arc before you start writing or is it more of an organic process?

The story-arc begins first and the world develops alongside it.

I start by doing a great deal of thinking. My favourite time for this is while driving or doing housework. I rarely write much of this down, because I end up knowing my world – the part I am writing about anyway – just as well as I know this one. I know without looking it up in my notes that the fishing boats of my invented land put out to sea in the morning and return to port before nightfall, just as I know, without doing a Google search, that our refrigerated boats here on Earth don’t have to do that.

I like to have the larger picture in place before I begin – the politics, the commerce, the religion, the landscape, the climate. Much of the detail, however, is only conceived while I am writing the story. I try to integrate these details as the story unfolds (rather than throw them in huge chunks at the reader), much the same way we learn the details of our new surroundings when we move to another country. I’m an expert on the real thing – I’ve lived on four different continents!

I do start with a map, though. It may, however, be altered to suit the story as I write. If a river is in the way of characters on a journey, I will re-route the whole valley!

The story-arc remains flexible until I write the last word, but when I start on the first chapter I must have a clear idea of the beginning, the end and the highlights – the key scenes. The rest is a bit fuzzy, like looking through a fog which won’t clear until I get there.

Can you tell us a bit about where the idea for The Mirage Makers came from?

As a young mother, I was horrified by two real life stories emerging from two countries. One was an Australian tragedy of almost incomprehensible hubris, where many Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their parents, supposedly for the benefit of the children. They were often raised with no knowledge of their own culture or families, sometimes even taught to denigrate their heritage. The second story was the tragedy of the “Disappeared Ones” of Argentina. During this time, pregnant women caught up in the political brutality had their babies taken away at birth, to be raised by the families of their captors, while they themselves were murdered.

These events moved me. How terrible it must have been not only to lose your child, but to know they would be raised by people with different values, possibly values you despised.

A little later we moved to Vienna, Austria. One evening, I watched a TV historical drama (in Italian, which I don’t speak) sub-titled in German (which I can read, but too slowly to keep up with sub-titling). It was about an Imperial investigator being sent by Rome to Jerusalem to find out why people believed that a man had survived his crucifixion a year or two earlier. The investigator scorns the story as pure fantasy… About then, it became too complicated for me to follow, but it didn’t matter. My own imagination was already hard at work.

All those things came together to form the basis of the plot for Heart of the Mirage. I didn’t do anything about it at the time because I was writing The Isles of Glory, but a year or two later my husband transferred to Tunisia, and I could see the ruins of Roman Carthage from my study window and we had the base of a Roman pillar in our rose garden. When southerly winds blew, Saharan dust piled up at my front door, desert on the move…

That was when I had to start writing the Mirage Makers trilogy.

Ligea is such a strong and interesting female character and it was wonderful to see how she grew over the trilogy. Do you have any favourites among your characters?

Part of me loves all my characters, even the villains. I do like Ligea, not because she’s a lovely person − she’s definitely not that – but because I feel for her. She’s a woman who would probably have been kind and loving and nurturing, if she had not been raised to kill ruthlessly in the service of her Emperor and her manipulative mentor. She’s the child removed from her culture and her family, to be raised by her enemies to despise both. She does not have much of a chance, yet she manages to rise above her beginnings and develop as a human being. She can never entirely leave her past behind, but in the end, she does her best.

The character whose life history tore me up most when I was chronicling it, however, was Arrant. So many awful things happened to him, none of which he deserved, and sometimes I almost wept as I wrote about them. It was heartbreaking.