Reposting a favorite round-table blog.
Carol Berg: One of my aims when I create new heroes or heroines is to make them real people. I want readers to believe they had a life before walking onto the canvas of my story and will (if the story permits!) have a life when they walk off again. But of course, after the traumas/losses/victories of the story, the nature of that life is often irrevocably changed.
Ever since my novel Song of the Beast was published, I’ve
had readers asking what became of Aidan McAllister--a scarred, broken singer of
visions, who saved his world from the scourge of dragon warfare. At the end of
the story, he abandons his friends and his hope of a normal life to lead the
beasts into the wild. I decided that it would be fun to satisfy the readers’
curiosity and mine, and so I wrote “The Heart’s Coda.”
Marie Brennan: Some years ago I bought a pair of black-and-red beaded earrings from the jeweler Elise Matthesen, who habitually gives titles to all the pieces she makes. The earrings are called "At the Sign of the Crow and Quill," and like many authors, I pledged to Elise that I would try to write something by that title someday. The mood that evoked in my mind was very much a Lace and Blade mood, so when I received an invitation to submit to the anthology, that turned out to be the spark I needed to transform the phrase into characters and plot.
Heather Rose Jones:
“Gifts
Tell Truth” is set in the same world as my Alpennia series: a
The events in “Gifts Tell Truth” haven’t been specifically
referenced in the books, other than a passing comment about how the stories of
her youth aren’t appropriate for innocent ears. But I knew in a general way
that during the French occupation of Alpennia, just after Jeanne’s unexpected marriage
to a much older French aristocratic émigré, she led a wild and scandalous life,
spurred on by a tragic event in her coming-out season (which will be told in a
later story). The current story grew out of wanting to explore the origins of
some of her later attitudes and reflexes, with the added bonus of showing the
start of an odd but enduring friendship that features in the novels.
