by Helen Lowe
Today is celebration day! Over the past few months I have blogged here about reading for the Hugo Awards, and also about why I love writing Fantasy-Science Fiction (F-SF) myself—but today is the day. Today my own novel, The Heir of Night—the first in the epic The Wall of Night quartet—GOES ON SALE throughout the USA and Canada. WOOT! From where I’m sitting, that definitely means popping the champagne cork and pouring bubbly, marching bands along mainstreet, and fireworks lighting up the heavens. Did I say Woot—oh yeah, I did already!
Celebration, definitely—especially when you get to hold the real book in your hands, as I did yesterday, and see how wonderful it looks with the blue Gregory Bridges cover, smell the new paper scent of the pages, and feel the embossed text of the title The Heir of Night. Yet the questions interviewers and blog posters are asking around what inspired Heir have also sparked reflection: why did I embark on the long road of becoming a published author and writing this book in particular. The answer, of course, is pretty simple: “Dudes, I just didn’t have a choice!”
As a kid, I always wanted to write, scribbling down poems and stories, and I continued to do so into my teens. But then life took over as it so frequently does, with obligations to family and community, study and then paid employment. I still wrote occasionally, but without any definite purpose. Until the muses, Melpomene (tragedy) and Calliope (epic) I’m pretty sure—although I wasn’t the one doing the talking—kicked down my door and demanded why I wasn’t writing. And let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I’d better get one with it!
“Oh, come on,” I hear you cry, “you’re just telling another story!” And, of course, I am! But like many stories that present as fiction, this one holds considerable truth: I was waking up at nights with the dreadful question: “Why aren’t you writing? You need to be writing!” filling the surrounding darkness. So whether it really was the tragic and epic muses kicking in the creative door like a two gal special ops team (perhaps they’d been reading a lot of CJ Cherryh’s Chronicles of Morgaine up there on Helicon and Parnassus, or watching too much Buffy)—or just my subconscious mind recognizing that I needed to write seriously, the upshot was that I pulled out the case of incomplete manuscripts hiding under the bed and began writing The Heir of Night.
I feel honoured to share that story with you today and celebrate The Heir of Night going on sale, and also by the confidence so many people have shown in The Wall of Night series. Firstly, the wonderful Kate Nintzel, my editor, and Diana Gill and the rest of the Eos team; my agent Robin Rue and Beth Miller, her assistant; my partner, Andrew, whose support never wavers; and so many readers, family and friends. And then there’s the wider community of enthusiasts, interviewers and reviewers, librarians, booksellers and yet more readers I am meeting here, through Out of this Eos, as well as on my own blog, and through the Supernatural Underground. One and all: you rock!
So I hope you will now all “take a dram” and drink with me—at least in spirit!—to kick-ass muses and to The Heir of Night going on sale today throughout the United States and Canada. Most of all, I hope you will accept my salute to you, because if there is magic out there, it is only because separately and together, you make it happen.
Helen Lowe is a New Zealand-based speculative fiction writer. Her first novel, Thornspell, (Knopf, 2008) won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for “Best Novel: Young Adult” 2009, and Helen won the Award for “Best New Talent” in the same year. Helen’s second novel, The Heir of Night (The Wall of Night, Book One) is on sale in the USA and Canada today (Cartwheels and handsprings!). Helen also blogs on the first of every month on the Supernatural Underground and every day on her own Helen Lowe on Anything, Really site.
You can read the first 70 pages of The Heir of Night here, check out an early review on Bookloons and read an interview on RisingShadow.net And we understand there are more interviews to come on FantasyLit.com and Fiction Kingdom.
This sounds like a great book. I had not heard of it until EOS tweeted about it. But I have added it to my WANTED list. :) Thank you, and the best of luck to you!
Posted by: Melissa (My World...in words and pages) | October 03, 2010 at 06:32 PM