This is a story of true love and perserverance

Back in 2002, I finished a book.

It was the third book in a series which I had started working on in 1994 or so, except in some ways, it was the first. That is to say, it was a prequel to All the Windwracked Stars and The Sea thy Mistress, which took place oh, about 2300 years afterwards. Give or take a decade here and there.

It was a book about heroic mistakes, terrible consequences, tremendous betrayals, petrifying sacrifices, unrequited love, men who want to be wolves, wolves who can’t help being men, mad goddesses, the end of the world, and immortal gay Vikings. It was entitled By the Mountain Bound.

It did not, you will be shocked to learn, immediately find a publisher. In fact, when I submitted the first novel in the series to the person who would later become my agent, she gently suggested that maybe a book like the above (with additional steampunk, apocalypse, and technomancy) might not be the perfect first novel for a writer just starting out. Especially since I had this ambitious idea of a trilogy that could be read in any order, and which would seem to tell a differently-focused story depending on what order it was read in.

I went on to sell books in several other worlds–the Jenny Casey novels, the Iskryne stories (written with fellow Unplugged Storyteller Sarah Monette), the Promethean Age books, and the odd stand-alone. But I never quite lost my love for these odd little Norse steampunk fantasies. And I kept rewriting them when I had free time, bringing them up to my current level of storytelling skill over and over again.

Eventually, in the fullness of time, I was no longer trying to publish a first novel, but a tenth (or thereabouts.) And when All the Windwracked Stars finally did find a publisher, sequence became a little bit of a problem. You see, despite the fact that By the Mountain Bound takes place more than two millennia before All the Windwracked Stars, well–AtWS is the better entry point to the world.

And then there’s the The Sea thy Mistress problem to consider. Because certain events in By the Mountain Bound are essential backstory to The Sea thy Mistress. But they are also best understood in the light of All the Windwracked Stars, and… oh, bugger.

Um. Needless to say, there was a good deal of discussion between my editor, my agent, and me. Eventually, it was determined that the best way to handle this quandary was to publish AtWS first, BtMB second–as a prequel–and TStM third, to tie up the dangling plot threads in both other books. See, when you are a young unpublished writer,you don’t trouble your pretty head with things like “But how will a reader understand what the heck is going on here?”

Eventually, one becomes older and wiser, and the impact of practicalities on artistic vision becomes more obvious. But we were all young once.

And never fear! It’s still possible to read the books in any order, though of course you’ll know something about how an earlier book ends if you’ve read a later one. Because that was too neat a trick to let go of. (I stole it from Dave Duncan. Shhh, don’t tell.)

Anyway, the first one–All the Windwracked Stars–was published last October, and the second one–By the Mountain Bound–is out on Tuesday (at fine bookstores everywhere–and quite possibly already available, as there was no hard laydown date) .

I hope you find them as compelling a world to visit as I did. After all, the damned things haven’t left me alone for something like fifteen years.

And that’s how you get a first novel published: get ten others into print first, and then blackmail* your editor.

*An exaggeration for effect. Actually, she paid me.