CLEOPATRA 7.2 (see descriptive PW review on NEW page)

Hardback edition available Dec. 7, 2004

Now then, after Channeling Cleopatra, what does one do for an encore? Well, obviously, repeat the first act with variations. This time Leda Hubbard, the middle aged American Egyptologist isn't the one incorporating the queen into her own life. This time it is her younger Egyptian counterpart, an undercover activist who helps Middle Eastern women at risk because of the abuse by their male relatives of the power they wield in the paternalistic family. Gabriella helps remove these ladies before they are murdered by their families for some real or imagined slight on the male honor. She feels very strongly about this for more than intellectual reasons. As a young girl, she was forced to undergo the most extreme sort of "female circumcision." Joining Gabriella in her body, the very sexual Cleopatra is appalled by this and quite willing to help Gabriella with her goals, once she's achieved a few of her own. In the meantime, her own memories of her personally satisfying and active, if politically tragic, love life help convince Gabriella that there are men who are worth more than whatever trouble they may be.

Enter the character I thought of, but don't believe I ever called in the book,
"Mike the Merry Merc." Part of the fun of writing about blends is the contrast between the contemporary person and the historic implant. Marc Antony, famous lover though he was because of his association with Cleopatra, and famous general as well, was still a bit of a screw-up according to history. He was a good general in that he seemed to care deeply about his troops and was very brave and so forth. But his most famous battle is a classic naval disaster--instructors show Navy captains what NOT to do by citing the Battle of Actium, in which Antony and Cleopatra, with the greatest Navy in the known world, lost both it and Egypt very quickly to Rome. It's sort of understandable however, when in reading more about Antony, it becomes clear that while he was a charismatic person and apparently a marvelous lover, he was also, even in the days when wine flowed freely everywhere, a quite infamous drunk.

Mike, on the other hand, has learned that a drunken mercenary is a dead one and he has been clean and sober for 20 years. When Marc wants a drink, Mike wants a meeting. Well, he wants a meeting AND a drink but has actually done a lot of maturing over the years. All he really wants from Antony is to learn more about a treasure Gabriella/Cleopatra baited him with to get him to blend with the general in the first place.

Meanwhile Lea and her new love, Andrew McCallum, the financial genius who incorporated the brilliant but bankrupt Sir Walter Scott into HIS personality, are setting things in motion for a fateful trip up the Nile where Cleopatra in both her incarnations clashes with the real power structure of the modern world.

CHANNELING CLEOPATRA (see descriptions on NEW page)

Available in Paperback.

Since the description on the NEW page pretty much tells about the plot, let me tell you a little about the inspiration for this book and the research. The inspiration was simple. I live in a town where there's a big New Age population so lots of people are into channeling and past life regression. I was thinking about that and about DNA research stuff one day as I was crossing the street downtown and how people are always wanting to believe in a past life they were someone famous. What if by getting that person's DNA and somehow implanting it into a contemporary living person, that person could have the memories and personality traits of the famous person of his or her choice? While writing NOTHING SACRED and LAST REFUGE I became interested in Tibetan Buddhism and the belief in reincarnation and also in tulkus--people who are both someone from the past and also have the distinct personalities and knowledge of a living person. The Dalai Lama is the most famous tulku, a very politically expedient thing since if someone criticises the present Dalai Lama by saying, "The 5th Dalai Lama would have done this differently," the current Dalai Lama can always say, "Yes, but when we were the 5th Dalai Lama the circumstances were different so we have chosen to alter our methods this time." Or something like that. Anyhow, that's why Chimera, the scientist I introduce in PAST LIVES PRESENT TENSE is a Tibetan, the blend of the DNA of the late wife of a brilliant geneticist bereaved almost to disintegration by the loss of the woman who was and becomes his "better half." The person the scientists become after their blending is the most successful blend ever because the two were already more harmonious than most couples, and they blend their names to become Chimera.

I was influenced more by emotional factors than intellectual ones in my choice for the "blend" in Channeling Cleopatra. A friend of mine is an armchair Egyptologist and also has a strong interest in police work because her father was a policeman and a strong interest in forensics because she's interested in anthropology mostly, I think. However, although she's been to Egypt, she never got to really go there as an anthropologist. Shortly before I began this book, her father was injured and then died as an indirect result of his injuries. They had been really close and he was a colorful character so I decided to use these two in Egypt as a launching point for the book. Then it was time to read everything I could on Egypt--fortunately this friend already had a lot of library on the subject she loaned me. However, Cleopatra is, as she says in the book, a "pharaoh-come-lately" by my friend's standards so I had to start collecting books on Cleopatra and Alexandria, ancient and modern, as well as the books on ancient Egypt in general.

Two people helped me bring modern Alex alive--one was Dr. Susan Wilson, author of CULTURE SHOCK: EGYPT! who not only wrote an excellent and enlightening book but also answered my emails and gave me more benefit of her experience from working several years in Egypt. The other person showed up serendipitously at the UPS store trying to send a fax to her boyfriend in Alexandria while I was mailing a package. My ears pricked up. Since the office where the fax machine was in Alex seemed to be shut down at the time when Eileen Claire could email Mike, I offered to let her use my fax machine in exchange for telling me something about what Mike was telling HER about Alex. The big break came when Mike invited her to join him in Alex for a few weeks and she came back loaded with maps and modern artifacts and a head and journals full of details for me to use in the book. It was the next best thing to getting to go myself so all of the flavor of the city I mostly owe to Eileen and Susan.

THE LADY IN THE LOCH

Did you realize that some of our favorite horror stories have origins in Edinburgh, Scotland? Mary Shelly's Frankenstein has echoes of the resurrectionists whose desire for nice fresh corpses put Scottish Travellers and other expendable people of the day in terror for their lives. Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde had their (or his?) birthplace in the city too. There were also cannibals, witch trials, the ghosts of many cruelly treated people, and enough gruesome and frightening events in its history to pale the average comic book collection. Not to mention the politics!

One figure in particular stands out as not only titled and talented, but genial, kindly, oddly democratic for someone of his station, very human (he died writing off his debt, something I and many writers I know can identify with) funny, and very observant. Sir Walter Scott was in love with his country, with both the Edinburgh of his birth and the Borders so close to his heart. AND he was a sheriff too! I changed history around just a wee bit and made him a sheriff in Edinburgh instead of in the Border country, which was actually his beat. But in this somewhat altered reality, he is helped in solving crimes by the magical means of the day--murder victims who, at midnight on the night of their death, denounce their killer to those assembled at their wake. Corpses who begin to bleed if touched by the hand of their murderer. Ghostly lights in lakes and mist which show searchers where the bodies lie.

It's possible that by Scott's time the more scientific folk didn't believe these superstitions anymore but Scott really enjoyed that kind of romantic thing so if he were sheriff, and a little bit psychic, and needed to save women from a demented serial killer/resurrectionist/monster, he would certainly have given them the benefit of the doubt.

Even though I am no longer slim or very active, I had a great time walking up and down the Royal Mile seeking out historical places and mapping them in my mind and later, eureka! finding a map of the city as it was in Scott's day, great help in plotting the action. My hostess and fellow fantasy writer, Elizabeth Kerner Ewing, even arranged for us to be admitted to Scott's beloved home at Abbotsford in the off season, where one of his descendants came to greet us.

CAROL FOR ANOTHER CHRISTMAS

Me writing a Christmas book doing a modern version of A Christmas Carol was the publisher's idea, not mine. I wish every Christmas that there were more original Christmas stories and everyone would stop trying to find some tiny variation to modernize Dickens. The original story is pretty fantastic, as well as funny, without embellishment or modernization.

Then I thought that the real twist isn't that Scrooge doesn't like Christmas but that just about everybody else agrees with him, or in this case, her, the heiress of a megabucks computer software giant who is shown the ghosts of Christmases past present and future as they emerge from her computer screen by her own version of Marley's Ghost who is none other than the revived Ebeneezer Scrooge, back again to keep another poor soul from falling into the error of his previous ways.

The computer geeks who work for Monica, or Money as she's known to her employees, tell Scrooge it's too bad but he's got it all wrong. Money's right not to like Christmas. Christmas in July, a strictly commerical custom, spreads the stress throughout the year though nothing can compete with the war zone constituted by holiday traffic and mob scene malls. Poor Scrooge, in his day there was only him to dissent. Now he seems to have to take on all of modern society.

I ended up enjoying writing the book but was really disappointed when the company put a rather sappy cover on it and called it Carol for Another Christmas instead of using my original title, Humbug!

THE GODMOTHER'S WEB

The Godmother series came back to the States with this book, Felicity stayed in Ireland and another member of her sorority took over the good doing duties. In this case the godmother is the rather edgy figure from both Hopi and Navajo stories, Spider Grandmother, who taught the Navajos to weave and helped save them survive in this world.

Her peoples need help again. The government has really screwed up the living situation for both Navajos and Hopis, first partitioning off the reservation so that the Hopis had only the mesas without access to their holy places. The partition also made it illegal for Navajos who have lived for a hundred years on the same land to stay there. Everybody is angry and unhappy, ripe for the maniopulations of a skinwalker.

So Grandma Webster, as she calls herself, tries to heal the rift, ease the tension, and foil the skinwalker and the dark winds. Attaching herself to Cindy Ellis, in Hopiland on a trail ride, Grandma Webster catches in her fateful web a dedicated Hopi counselor, a Navajo woman doctor, and a woman who is so far out of harmony with herself that she feels she's beyond help.

Then there's Wiley Smiley, the half Hopi, half Navajo young entrepeneur, dedicated to making a fast buck and trying not to make his beautiful Hopi girlfriend too mad at him.

This book was great fun to research. I wanted to write it because I had so much enjoyed the time I spent working with Navajo and Pueblo people at the Gallup Indian Health Services Hospital, listening to stories and learning about their history, culture and customs. That was many years ago so I renewed my acquaintance by spending ten days with Navajo friends outside of Window Rock. I also visited the Hopi mesas often where a fellow Vietnam vet shared insights into his people's beliefs and ancient history. One thing that was interesting about writing a godmother book just then was that some Navajo women living on the Hopi Partitioned Land claimed to have been visited by Navajo holy people in the guise of angels. I didn't go to see them but one of my friends did and the Navajo Nation gave employees time off to go check out the incident for themselves.

THE GODMOTHER'S APPRENTICE

When a Fairy Godmother has blown her magical budget, she gets mandatory downtime by decree of her fellowFGMs. In Felicity's case, she still has a mission. Sno, the rock star's daughter, decided that being a princess was a drag. She wants to be a fairy godmother.

Earning her wand involves helping some young Irish Travelling People out of a scrape or two, assisting the King of the Cats in assuming his rightful throne, and helping a not-so-young couple find true love.

Interspersed with these chores, she gets a taste of the land of faerie when she ventures into the Godmother's Attic.

Since I was writing with Anne McCaffrey in Ireland when I wrote the first two Godmother books, I had research for this one close to hand. I hope Anne won't mind me saying that I modeled Felicity Fortune's house on Dragonhold-Underhill, except that in Anne's attic there is a quite practical furnace instead of fairyland and if you try to go into the hill under the stables, you'll get dirty instead of enchanted.

THE GODMOTHER

The premise was simple--what if someone wished for a fairy godmother to help the entire city of Seattle? An overworked, overstressed social worker named Rose does just that when she makes an idle wish on a mustard seed. Felicity Fortune of Godmothers Anonymous shows up to help.

What nobody in the fairytales ever says directly is, fairy godmothers are on a magical budget so every possible way they can get human beings or animals to assist each other they will try rather than magical means.

Still, Felicity encounters many situations strangely familiar to godmothers of fairytales. A pretty stablehand named Cindy Ellis is mistreated by her cruel stepsisters. A rock star's daughter, scared of the super model he married, runs away from home and encounters seven Vietnam veterans at an encounter session and retreat. One of them might be a big bad wolf, who knows?

The hardest case is that of two children whose parents have become so alienated and stressed out that they ignore the needs of the kids. The children are offered help by a man who builds a gingerbread house at the mall every Christmas. He is the modern day equivalent of a wicked witch or Bluebeard (which is considered a fairytale). He is the scariest of all criminals among us--a child molester and murderer. I warn you because some sensitive folk have written to me with complaints that they were not prepared for this dark turn of events and felt ambushed by it. Not my intention. Remember, the heroine is a social worker. These folks are on the front lines of domestic warfare and child molesters are the kind of people they encounter a lot. The good news is, this is a story so I am going to spoil it for you enough to tell you that the kids get away and the wicked man gets what's coming to him.

THE SONGKILLER SAGATHE SONGKILLER SAGA BOOK 1 THE PHANTOM BANJO, : BOOK 2 PICKING THE BALLAD'S BONES, BOOK 3: STRUM AGAIN?

THE SONGKILLER SAGA is actually the only trilogy I've done intentionally. After three very serious books, I was ready to laugh again and go back to the things I love, like folk music and ballads. Folk songs and music in general are actually more important in many peoples' lives than they realize. Throughout history, music has been what gets people through tough times, bad deals, and sometimes danger. It punctuates life events and occasionally carries the news. It has been known to bring rulers to their knees and governments to their senses.

An international consortium of devils have decided that it has to go. Folk music is just too potent to be allowed to continue. They start by wiping most songs from peoples' memories and also by killing off some of the more prominent culture-bearers among musicians. My little band of musicians wants their toons back and travel the country and the world to accomplish their mission.

The tone is sort of Southern Gothic from the viewpoint of a lady named Gussy who is in on all the proceedings, including the mechanations of a debauchery devil named Torchy who ends up siding with the musicians against her fellow devils because, as she says, "musicians have always been among my best people."

Unlike my book, it seems right now like the devils won the day. You don't hear a lot of folk music anymore, do you? It seems to have fallen out of fashion. Maybe we should be asking why.

NOTHING SACRED

author's note: SOMETHING ODD HAS HAPPENED WITH THESE BOOKS. They have been out of print for many years now but recently, strangely, the original publisher apparently uncovered a treasure trove of them in some warehouse and has sent the recovered copies forth into the stores as a sort of unofficial reissue. This pleases me. With the world in the shape it is now in, these books are so timely you may wish to start a new religion with me as your central prophet. (Just kidding). That's what science fiction and fantasy are all about, of course. Anyhow, go forth to Powell's or one of the other bookstores and find yourself copies especially if you like Healer's War and my other more serious work. EAS

Nothing Sacred, title and all, was inspired by a dream I had while researching Healer's War. I went to see THE HANOI HILTON at the movies and that night I had a dream where a prison camp and what seemed to be a Tibetan fortress got mixed up together. I knew the beginning, the ending, and all the middle bits but it took quite a bit of research into Tibet, where I've never been, to pull the book together. My research yielded a lot of fascinating material on the country of Tibet and its religion, the invasion of the Chinese, and the struggles of the Tibetan people in exile as well as those still living under Chinese rule. All of that went into my obligatory science fiction writer's end of the world book.

LAST REFUGE (no image available)

The bad news was that the world ended. The good news was that there is a sequel. The tone of this book is much more cheerful than that of the first book, consequently. It mostly concerns the question I've had since I was a little girl hiding under my desk during Conelrad alerts in grade school. Why is it more personally frightening to me to think of the world ending all together than the idea of my own personal death?

At least part of the answer is that if you believe in reincarnation and there are no living beings left on the planet, where would you go for a body? There are a great many lost souls and ghosts in this book but a very splendid Bodhisattva cat, who may appear in another incarnation in a mystery series I'm planning, and a yeti are helpful in giving life a chance to sprout again.

THE HEALER'S WAR

Usually research is my favorite part of writing a book. This one, very loosely based on my experiences as a nurse in Vietnam (with enormous fantastic liberty in the second part, particularly), was the exception. It was my editor's idea that I needed to write the book. I didn't want to and asked for enough money to get therapy while doing it if I needed it. I needed it. I also researched using the memoirs of and interviews with as diverse a bunch of Vietnam vets and Vietnamese people as I could find at the time, almost twenty years after the war. The book won the 1989 Nebula Award for best novel, though in many ways I think I was being rewarded for the non fiction parts.

The plot is pretty much the simplest of quests, told in first person by Lieutenant Kitty McCully, a recent graduate of a Midwestern nursing school. In Nam, Kitty finds she is way over her head as a nurse on the neurosurgery ward. After an incident where an error of hers almost kills a young Vietnamese patient, she is transferred to orthopedics, where she learns to know and like a great many of the Vietnamese patients (the GIs are brought in and transferred out because of the infection rate so quickly she rarely gets to know any of them. The Vietnamese have no other safe place to go and are in the hospital for months sometimes). When a callous new surgeon sends one of Kitty's patients to the Vietnamese version of a hospital, where the nearly recovered woman dies within two weeks, Kitty is furious. When the same doctor threatens to transfer a little boy amputee, she tries to work around the system and take the boy to another Army hospital south of her duty station. She enlists the help of an old boyfriend chopper pilot. The chopper is shot down, Kitty's friend and his crew chief killed, and she and the boy are left alone to try to make it back through hostile jungle to US held territory. Along the way, she discovers the subtle magical power of an amulet given to her by a dying Vietnamese shaman (of apre-Buddhist, pre-Catholic religious affiliation).

That's as much plot as I can divulge without spoiling it for readers, but I will say that while writing it I felt a duty to my fellow vets and my Vietnamese patients not to use fantasy as an excuse to write romanticized BS, but to tell about war as I saw it the way I saw it impacting civilians and soldiers alike.

Available only as a collector's edition from Easton Press.

DRASTIC DRAGON OF DRACO, TEXAS

Pelagia Brigid Harper, daughter of a drunken San Francisco newspaper owner, is fed up with fetching her daddy out of bars and runs away from home to follow her dream. She has always wanted to be a penny-dreadful (or, slightly more upscale, dime novel) chronicler of the Wild West like her idol, Ned Buntline. Travelling across the wilds of West Texas by mule train in search of adventure, she finds way too much of it when the wagons are attacked by Indians and she is taken prisoner by a couple of Comanche braves, Their motives are purely economic. They plan to sell her into slavery to the Comanchero who runs his own little fiefdom at Fort Draco. Before they get there, however, they are attacked by something large with glowing eyes and a fiery breath--something that speaks inside Pelagia's head.

The next thing she knows, Pelagia is waking up in a rustic room at Fort Draco. The boss, Don Francisco, doesn't seem nearly as bad as she'd been led to believe his kind were. However, when he wishes to know who she is, possibly for reasons of ransom (which she knows is a joke) she relies on her Irish creativity and becomes her dream, telling him that she is the famous novelist Valentine Lovelace researching a book on the colorful and thrilling comancheros of West Texas. Don Francisco (aka Frank Draco) falls for it, and takes her into his confidence, even throwing a baile or party in her honor. She is quite well treated and is befriended by the Ledbetters, a couple who run the domestic side of Draco's operation, the Mexican maiden Mariquilla, and his daughter and her Indian playmate. She doesn't feel too endangered, actually.

But then another problem develops. The drought that perpetually plagues the Big Bend area worsens until there is only one watering hole left for hundreds of miles around. With Frank and his comancheros out on a vengeful raid against the Indians they think stole all of the Fort's horses, the civilians of Fort Draco have to brave the desert heat and walk for miles to bring back water or die of thirst.

Then another problem develops. Our Heroine once more encounters the presence with the glowing eyes, the fiery breath, the antique diction babbling in her head. The presence has scales. It looks like a giant gila monster. It is the Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas, known to the Mexicans as the living presence of an ancient god who demands--ulp--sacrifices to end the drought.

What's a girl to do?

THE GOLDCAMP VAMPIRE

I hate to give it away, but Pelagia/Valentine Lovelace, escapes the dragon in good enough shape for a sequel. After the funeral of her rather useless father, one of his former mistesses, the incomparable Sasha Devine, invites the young novelist to join her on a journey to the Yukon where a girl in the entertainment industry can get rich on miner's gold if she plays her cards right, In fact, one of Sasha's admirers, seemingly a sentimental miner who struck it rich, promises to set her up in her own establishment if only she will close a cold case file for him, so to speak, by bringing the remains of his dead partner back up to Dawson City so he can be buried near the claim that would have made him wealthy, had he survived long enough.

It is, as we in 2004 would suspect, an obvious vampire ploy. However, in Valentine's time, Dracula was just being published and hadn't made it to San Francisco yet. Nobody heard of Bram Stoker or the Count so she doesn't know that being asked to transport a coffin is--umm hmmm. Yep.

Thus she comes to meet, among other characters, Vasily Vladovitch Bledinoff, the "admirer" or Sasha's. He's moving to the Yukon not so much for the gold as for the climate, the more or less 24 hour companionship and because vampires have the sort of reverse SADS that makes them chipper during the long dark day of winter in the frozen North. Other even eviller folk abound, but Valentine and Sasha are aided by mountie Sgt. Destin of the Yukon (a dour Scot of Clan Destin lineage) and a rampaging were-moose.

These are not intended to be serious books, folks, but you could learn a lot about the wilder part of the west and the Yukon gold rush from them, as I did while I spent many happy hours researching them. I ran around to cactus gardens and, yep, old comanchero forts with friends from Texas and even saw the eerie Marfa (ghost) lights in the Big Bend in an appropriately Texan manner through the telescopic site on my friend's hunting rifle. Also did a bunch of library time at the University of Texas at Austin. I was living in Alaska while writing Goldcamp Vampire. My alma mater, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has a wonderful library with a basement full of oral histories, old letters, and other primary source material about Alaska and the Yukon. The fantastic bits may be figments of my imagination but much of the adventure and background is based on real historic place and occurance.

THE HAREM OF AMAN AKBAR

Although this book was published with two different covers (the first one was brown, which we already knew didn't work) somehow or other only a handful of people seem to have read it. Maybe Arabian Nights fantasy wasn't in right then. Maybe it's not now. Anyway, I had a lot of fun writing it.

Told from the viewpoint of Rasa, a barbarian warrior woman, the story begins when a genie is compelled to her procure for his master (who has a "taste for ugly foreign women"), the story is really a take-off on several in the Arabian Nights. If you read the Sir Richard Francis Burton version, the stories are very very politically incorrect with horrible things happening to women, black people, and animals. Rasa doesn't know any of this of course to begin with. Always game for an adventure, she finds the magic carpet ride pretty interesting and her new husband agreeably sexy. The genie himself is a product of Arabian Nights culture, however, and wishes his master would follow the wishes of his mother, Um Aman, and do the usual thing and marry his cousin the Beautiful Hyaganoosh. Unbeknownst to Rasa, Aman Akbar, what with a genie and everything, is feeling magnanimous and is really into marrying people, despite having just acquired the barbarian woman, so he decides to court Hyaganoosh and make his mama happy. Hyaganoosh has another agenda, however, the genie falls into the wrong hands, and Aman Akbar suffers the typical Arabian Nights fantasy of foolish men and is turned into a white ass.

This presents Rasa with a number of problems--many of them female. She finds out that her hunky new hubby has been sharing the love with a couple of other wives, the sweetly slinky African princess Amollia and the demure Asian beauty, Lady Aster. With Aman Akbar out of the picture, the wives are only three gently used previously owned foreign females in a land that is not kind to their kind. Um Aman, who is not in much better shape socially than they are, wants her son and provider back. She becomes the reluctant ally of the brides. Because, what else could they do? They didn't have marriage counselors back then and there so the problem required a quest. Under the leadership of Rasa, and with the assistance of the women's side of the society they landed in, they leave the confines of the seraglio to the sinister land of Sindupore to find the genie who made such an ass of their husband and make the devious djinn turn Aman Akbar back into the man they married.

BRONWYN'S BANE

THE CHRISTENING QUEST

(no cover pic available)

BRONWYN'S BANE

The cover alone is enough to let any biologist know this is not just your ordinary fantasy. The monster the very grownup looking Bronwyn (who is only about 12 or so during this adventure but looks like Red Sonja in Roman armor) is the dreaded moat monster guarding entrance to the castle--the Red Tape Worm. The magic words to get past it are informational bits like your blood type and mother's maiden name. And dental records.

Poor Princess Bronwyn starts her quest because she fears she can never attain her regal destiny if she cannot overcome the curse foisted upon her at birth by an ill-tempered magical relative who apparently didn't care for babies. Bronwyn cannot tell the truth. She must lie. Always. Not realizing that this is an advantage for a girl with a political future ahead of her, Bronwyn and of course a few questing companions set off to lift the curse so she can be an honest queen. Just looking at that Red Tape Worm you can see what the poor girl is up against!

In THE CHRISTENING QUEST, the last book in the series, another baby princess of the realm is stolen by relatives on her father's side, who are gypsies (Ablemarlonian girls seem to have a thing for wayward wayfaring strangers). A prince handsome enough to attract the attention of the love smitten pink and purple dragon offspring of the torch singing wyrm and her mate should have prevented the kidnapping and tracks the perpetrators through many perils, meeting a number of foes including the skunk streaked villainess Effluvia, until he comes to where the gypsies and the baby have arrived for the baby's gypsy christening--the crystal caverns. I would cheerfully put up a cover photo of this book but it must have sold even better than the others because I don't seem to have a copy of it any longer. This series was really very popular when it came out and I still have fans asking me when the next book--about Princess Romany, the baby in Christening Quest is coming out. Though I've done a short story for an elves anthology about Romany, I haven't been able to interest a new publisher in another book. Yet.

SONG OF SORCERY AND THE UNICORN CREED

Song of Sorcery is the first of four novels in the Songs from the Seashell Archives quartet, set in a world that is a hybrid of Alaska, Fairyland, and the world of the Scottish and English ballads.Unicorn Creed is the second in the series

In Song of Sorcery, a young woman named Maggie Brown, accompanied by her grandmother's talking cat Ching and a rather fussy minstel named Colin, sets off to find her sister. Poor Amberwine has apparently gone nuts and left the kingly husband who loves her to follow the hunky but heartless (literally) Gypsy Davey. In most medieval worlds a girl off on more or less her own would be in a lot of trouble. Maggie is in a lot of trouble but she has a slight advantage. She can do anything that could be classified as or even lied about as being housework by magic. Someone said "oh, I love hearthwitch" novels but to the best of my knowledge this is the first. Inspired by many old ballads, the book nevertheless is also the first to use the sort of dialogue found in the television programs Xena and Hercules and also maybe Shrek--contemporary sounding references and slang which might be what people would be saying in their language if they wanted to translate from the contemporary terms of their own time and place. Fairytale language, Ballad language, but with a twist I felt as appropriate to down to earth practical Maggie. Also, there is a torch singing dragon I'm just sure is the great grandma of the one in Shrek--in fact, her daughter dragon in The Crystal Cavern, falls in love with someone of another species and LOOKS very much like Dragon in the movie. And this book was written twenty years ago so I think it may have been read by some Dreamworks artist as a child. I'm flattered.

The Unicorn Creed follows Maggie's further adventures. In Song of Sorcery she bonds with a unicorn named Moonshine. Now that she's safely brought Amberwine back home to her kingly husband, Roari Rowan, Maggie's own royal father has decided it's time to marry off the remaining princess--"who? me?" is the hearthwitch's reaction. She doesn't want to marry or have anything carnal to do with mortal men. For one thing, mating is supposed to be the end of her magic powers, which is bloody inconvenient timing for a hearthwitch if she's just about to set up joint housekeeping arrangements. More urgently important to Maggie however, is that she fears she will lose contact with her beloved Moonshine, who must follow the prissy Unicorn Creed that his companion "must be a maiden indeed." Escaping the tower where her frustrated father has imprisoned her until she selects a mate, she runs off on another quest to try to sort out how to have her unicorn and a guy too. She ends up tangling with her nasty Uncle Fearchar, a sorcerer whose magic can be thwarted only by taking it with a grain of salt. Along the way, she meets the torching dragon's faithless mate, an ice worm, and other critters. Oh, and Colin and Ching, who are also very important. If you can find a copy anywhere, read it and you'll see.