Welcome! This year I’m creating a set of posts/blogs/whatever you want to call them about the “story-behind-the story” for my backlist. This month, the Goddess’s Honor series, my non-European high fantasy books, are the focus.
Housekeeping note: all related posts will be linked at the bottom.
Where to begin when I start talking about the Goddess’s Honor books, especially now that I’m releasing the third edition? For one thing, they’re drawing from the oldest work I started doing, way back in high school (aka a long time ago in a universe far, far away from now). I had just finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the—oh, I don’t know how many times I read and reread LOTR. That kicked me off into E. R. Eddison during my high school days which…can be kinda interesting. I developed a fascination for Eddison’s plots, especially A Fish Dinner in Memison. But a big part of my fascination for Fish Dinner had to do with the absolutely amazing Fiorinda, coupled with Lady Mary Lessingham.
That said, another issue was location. I didn’t travel much as a kid simply because my parents were working and when they weren’t working, they were busy on the small farm or else hard-core fishing at a Central Oregon reservoir where the goal was to catch as many trout as possible to be frozen, canned, or smoked. My exposure was either the Willamette Valley or that small section of Central Oregon near Bend. Visualizing European settings just didn’t work for me because they were just something I’d seen in pictures (the closest I’ve come to seeing an actual castle even now? The Louvre. The Rijksmuseum. A castle-like structure in the Southwest built at the Hovenweep site by Native peoples).
The first versions ended up being quasi-science fiction because I discovered McCaffrey’s Pern as well as André Norton, along with Sylvia Louise Engdahl. The story really didn’t go anywhere, so I started looking at other parts of that world.
That…was pretty much the way things went for years whenever I tried to write something in that world. I grew up, did some more traveling, but the core of the story was set in the Pacific Northwest. When I first saw a picture of Wallowa Lake I was gobsmacked because that was part of the world I was visualizing. When I finally visited the place, it was just as I had thought it would be.
All the same, I kept wrestling with the story. I had settled on a strictly fantasy notion, finally, writing about the descendant of exiled nobles who faced a dire situation when the Empire suddenly remembered that they had this colony over the ocean that might, y’know, need to be forced back into compliance with the Empire. Try as I could, however, I couldn’t get the main character, Alicira ea Miteal, to talk to me. She just didn’t want to come clear.
So I moved on to writing other things. Hunting and camping trips both to the Wallowas and the Ochocos gave me more ideas for settings. Pages and pages of notes. I realized that Alicira had fled to the high desert mountains to escape her captor from the Empire, and ended up in a throuple that ruled the Two Nations of Keldara and Clenda. But how had she made it safely to Heinmyets and Inharise? I just couldn’t figure it out.
I finally started writing short stories set in that world. One of those stories was about a roving village healer named Katerin who ended up in a mysterious village with a Healer gone rogue. The last rejection for that story said “this reads like the first chapter of a novel.” And the rejecting editor had the same name as the teacher working in the room next to me. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the same person, but all the same, the coincidence caught my eye and made me think, “perhaps this story might work as the first chapter of a novel.”
Once I started working on Katerin’s story, suddenly things started coming clear in this world. Seven Crowned Gods, feuding and arguing while using humans as their pawns. Katerin moving from being just a bit player in what was going on to becoming a significantly important person who had the potential to be a game changer. That broke everything loose, though it took a while before I could write Alicira’s story, which is why Pledges of Honor was written and published before Beyond Honor, even though Beyond Honor is now listed as the first book in the series.
Rekaré, Alicira’s daughter, was equally challenging. Oh, I finally broke through to her but it also took Katerin to make it happen.
However, by the time I reached Judgment of Honor, the story had completely shifted on me. I didn’t anticipate events twisting in Medvara (Alicira’s homeland) the way that they did. I didn’t anticipate the role of the Gods, or Katerin’s daughter Witmara. I somewhat knew what Rekaré’s fate was going to be, just not how she got there.
The Goddess’s Honor series, however, was the one that convinced me that no matter what, in the future I was going to write a series all at once before releasing it. Continuity became a huge issue toward the end, and I had to figure out how to retcon things I had set up in the earlier stories.
Well, writing is a learning process. I’m happy to say that Pledges of Honor is my “little book that could.” I first sold it to a small press, then took the rights back before it even entered editing due to several issues. It sold well in its first edition, enough that its earnings were a big chunk of my qualifying for full membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. This release is now the third edition for the series, in part due to some formatting changes and new covers.
I hope the whole series manages to sell in this new edition, because it is close to my heart in so many ways. It features magical horses that act like real horses (Mira, Katerin’s first daranval, is loosely based on a school horse I rode for a couple of years, Porsche). I start introducing combinations of magic and technology in Choices of Honor and Judgment of Honor. Katerin’s traumatic return to the land where she grew up, Waykemin, in Choices of Honor was a tough book to write.
Which…is also happening as I begin the work on the saga of what happens after the Goddess’s Honor series. The threat of the Divine Confederation, which emerges in Judgment of Honor. What becomes of the Darani Empire after the events of Judgment. At this point, I’m leaving Katerin behind, but Heinmyets of the Two Nations has a big role to play in this next installment.
But that’s the future. I hope you seek out the Goddess’s Honor books, or at the least their connected short stories (which can be found in the appropriate order at the end of each Goddess’s Honor book or purchased independently).
Find Beyond Honor and Other Stories here.
And hey, if you already have the books but want to toss a few coins to a struggling writer, buy me a coffee!
