Sasharia En Garde
Book release day. This is a rerelease, actually, with two books back together* as I originally intended. And a polish, because my prose can always use a polish.
This one has an odd history in that the first half of the story (not the first half of the novel) occurred to me in the early seventies, when I was working the Mythopoeic Society booth at the Renaissance Pleasure Fair, then in Malibu. I looked into the dusky light of a grove, and saw a guy wearing fantasy period garb with an air, and thought, what if he really was a prince, and no one believed it? Maybe not handsome, because his hair is too fuzzy and his nose too big, but with a genuine smile and an air of good nature?
And within seconds there was a story--he's visiting various worlds, people take him for an actor, and everything he says as part of his persona, and he's so good-natured he goes right along with it to see what happens . . . and he meets sun dancingstar, because in those days capital letters were Establishment, as well as legally changing your name. And the two hit it off, and go back to his world . . . and though he thoroughly enjoys his hippie princess throwing his stultified court into chaos, his indulgence costs him a kingdom. Not because of her, but because of the underlying problem's he's been too easy-going and unworldly to see.
Ugh! I am so not writing that ending, I'm fed up with dreary endings enough in my course work. So I dropped it, and over the years I'd take it out and reread it, and I could never throw it away, though the prose was getting as shabby as the notebook. But the story still tugged at me. Then a full generation later, when I reread it, I knew exactly where it was going. Because by then I'd seen Sun's (by now she'd compromised on a capital) full-grown daughter, raised briefly in the other country, then on the run, then shifted back here to live always on the run, while mom and daughter trained constantly in martial arts.
But she gets found anyway and taken back. And here was where the new story wanted to start, with all that old stuff in the background, because though the story was still bright for me, that college-age prose couldn't be revived. I had a great deal of fun writing it.
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* Samhain Books had it for the contracted seven years. And while I liked them very much, they mostly tend toward the heated or hot romance, where as this is a romantic fantasy. So the covers were never right. And I did want to clean up the prose as well as put it back together as one book. (There were a lot of heated-in-the-other-way complaints about the first book ending with the most abrupt cliff-hanger ever, but at the time Samhain couldn't deal with fat fantasy print-wise.)