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The family health issues have been confirmed and are worse than I had thought, but I need to have some discussions with other people before talking too much about it. The next few months are going be very hard and likely very expensive in the bargain. I'm already looking at picking up side gigs and rearranging deadlines and such. It continues to be a good day to buy something from the Etsy or Queen of Swords Press, or both.

Apart from that, I have been to an online, interactive play (Reboot: Walking Shadow Theatre Company); seen Death on the Nile (lordy, but that was some scenery chewing. And so much emoting. ALL the emoting); and been to the MN Opera for the first time in years. The Anonymous Lover was a lovely bit of fluff and now I have a crush on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the composer.  Seriously, absolutely fascinating man and there needs to be a movie or three and some romance novels about him, stat.

We also went to see the snow sculptures in St. Paul, which were impressive, and the Como Park Conservatory, which was lovely and warm and green. I am enjoying "Around the World in 80 Days" and Vienna Blood: Season 2." "Gilded Age " is silly, but good to watch while working on things. I have started the next werewolf novel, a new chapter of my serialized novel for my Patreon and a new short story. I am also addicted to Wordle.

I just finished loading up the next Queen of Swords Press title, The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones (coming in April!) for preorder. It is a glorious retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" that goes to many unexpected places. And Heather is a terrific author so I'm excited to be publishing her.

Otherwise, it looks like a friend of a friend will be buying our now "extra" car, so that's good. I'm getting better at making keffir (the yogurt is just not getting solid) and dehydrating things in the dehydrator I got us for the holidays. The day job is survivable most of the time. And I'm looking forward to some fun events and such this year. More soon...


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Next up on my list (see A.C. Wises' interviews here) of Pride StoryBundle authors to interview is author Heather Rose Jones. In addition to writing a great historical fantasy series about queer women in a magical kingdom in Europe, Heather blogs extensively about lesbians and queer women in history and maintains a splendid podcast that mixes fiction, author interviews and historical research on the same topic. Welcome, Heather!

Can you tell us a bit about the book you have in this StoryBundle?

 

Floodtide is the story of an ordinary girl, thrown into the midst of extraordinary times. For the fourth book in my Alpennia historic fantasy series, I wanted to shake things up a bit: focus on a working class character, not the rich and powerful; view the world through a single viewpoint of limited experience; and give my collection of teenaged minor characters a chance to have adventures on their own while the adults were distracted.

 

Rozild is a laundry maid and aspiring apprentice dressmaker. Through her friendship with Celeste, the dressmaker’s daughter, she’s introduced to the world of the charmwives--the folk-magic side of the ceremonial magic and alchemy that dominated the earlier books. Roz has an awkward habit of falling in love with girls, which forms a counterpoint to all the other challenges she needs to navigate, but the deep friendships that survive the test are what save the day when the waters rise and fever stalks the city.

 

At the mid-point in the seven-book series, I wanted to write a story that could stand alone and be an introduction to my little magical Ruritania

 

What do you find engaging/important about writing LGBTQ/queer fiction?

 

Writing fiction is always a case of fixing a spotlight on a limited slice of reality (for a reality that can include fantastic and unreal things). Fiction doesn’t have the fractal diversity of real life, so it’s easy for an author’s own interests and biases (whether hidden or overt) to filter what gets onto the page. When all the filters that are allowed to be published are aligned on the same wavelength, the result is a polarized light that only allows readers to “see” a fraction of the world.

 

When I was a young sff reader just beginning to understand my sexuality, the closest identifications I could find in sff were metaphors and allegories: closeted magical races, the demi-monde of vampires, alienated teenage protagonists who only knew that they were different from everyone around them and who went on quests to find their destiny. Those are all marvelously rich literary tropes, but woman cannot live on tropes alone. I wanted characters who were like me and who also had those experiences.

 

Writing in the field of historic fantasy and historic romance--and especially given the hard work of researching and interpreting the lives and experiences of queer people in the past--I also feel that fiction has a key role in rooting our identities throughout the entirety of human existence. Queer people in the past weren’t just like us, but they were there. And that same filtered, polarized light in both fiction and non-fiction writing about history has insisted for too long that they were not there. Writing queer people back into history--even a fantastic history with magic--is my way of claiming my place as an equal member of humanity.

 

What books or stories do you have out that readers of this StoryBundle might enjoy?

 

Obviously, if they like Floodtide, then I highly recommend that they check out the entire Alpennia series, starting with Daughter of Mystery. By the time they come round again to the events of Floodtide they’ll have a new appreciation for how it all fits together. And if they’d like a non-fantasy story that shows just how queer the actual past could be, They might enjoy my free novelette “The Mazarinette and the Musketeer” which takes several real-life women of the late 17th century and throws them together in a fluffy adventure.

 

Aside from your own work, what are some of your favorite queer reads you would recommend to folks?

 

I’m going to suggest three very different works that have grabbed me in different ways. The first is T. Kingfisher’s The Raven and the Reindeer which is the f/f Snow Queen story that would have overturned my life if it had existed when I was a teenager. The second is Claire O’Dell’s near-future gender-flipped Sherlock Holmes series, the Janet Watson Chronicles (A Study in Honor and The Hound of Justice) which may have been a bit too painful in predicting the sort of future we now find ourselves in. The third is Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads which--in the midst of historic pain and tragedy--is a tightly-woven cloth of so many different ways of being, feeling, and loving that I felt more included than I do in 99% of books, despite none of the characters resembling my life at all.

 
Thanks, Heather! The Pride StoryBundle runs until 7/1 and our selected charity is Rainbow Railroad, an organization that works with LGBTQ+ refugees.

 



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I have always had a fondness for historical fiction, especially the kind with swords and awesome women. Enter Heather Rose Jones and her new novel, Daughter of Mystery, which features my two favorite elements of historical fiction, plus magic and a lesbian romance. I am, of course, reading it now. I should also note that it's the beginning of a new series, set in Jones's fantasy European country of Alpennia. Read on...

dom   hrj

                                           "A Web of Women"

My goal for Daughter of Mystery was to write a ripping good tale of adventure, love, and intrigue. Set in the fictitious country of Alpennia in the early 19th century, Margerit Sovitre is resigned to abandoning her philosophical studies for the approved goal of making a good marriage. When her godfather unexpectedly leaves her a fortune--including a mysterious bodyguard named Barbara--the world opens up along paths she never expected. But those paths, as well as her developing talent for thaumaturgy thrust her into the center of Alpennian politics and soon she and Barbara must flee an accusation of treason.

 

Beyond the straightforward mind-candy of the adventure (though I like to hope it’s in the “artisanal dark chocolate” category of mind-candy) one underlying theme began to pervade not only Daughter of Mystery but the initial sketches for its sequels: the networks and communities that women build in the face of a society that excludes them from the formal structures of power and agency. Men’s actions may precipitate both Margerit’s hazards and opportunities, but it’s among women that she finds the allies to achieve her goals. The developing romance with Barbara is only the most obvious source of strength. A spinster aunt lends the orphaned Margerit the cover of her respectability, seeing in Margerit the opportunity to finally seize her own small measure of independence. In the capitol of Rotenek, Margerit is welcomed by a loose community of female scholars, from fashionable upper-class dilettantes to hard-headed working-class women hoping for a better life. Her inheritance gives Margerit entrée to a new social world in Rotenek, but it is the female allies she finds there who teach her how to use it for her own purposes. When disaster strikes, the nuns of Saint Orisul’s offer sanctuary both for body and mind, and in the final crisis Barbara’s ties to an ex-lover bring crucial assistance.

In the sequel currently in progress (The Mystic Marriage), we see this web of women woven ever more strongly: bound as colleagues, patrons, friends, lovers, and kindred both by blood and choice. Or rather, more of this web is revealed to the reader, for Margerit and Barbara and their friends are only dipping into a vast river that has always flowed through their lives.

Women’s ties and friendships often go overlooked, both in history and in literature. But because the very premise of my stories was to focus on women’s lives and their relationships to each other, it was easy and natural to bring these elements to the fore. Not that men have no place in the stories--far from it. They feature strongly as allies and adversaries. But the nature of early 19th century European society sets barriers between the lives of men and women that make the quality of the interactions distinct.

I didn’t consciously choose the setting of my story for this purpose, though my own historic interests made it a natural outgrowth. It’s hard to know who we are unless we know who we have been. So many aspects of the lives of women--and particularly of women who love women--have been dismissed or erased from the histories we are fed. Yet the traces and clues are there to follow and to build on. Although I write fiction, it is not necessary to invent whole-cloth to participate in the creation of a usable history of women’s lives and lesbian lives. Fortunately, the roads are better paved and more clearly marked these days than they were when I first started writing in the late ‘70s. My own preference is to ground my historic fiction in fact, not in wishful thinking. (Well, ok, except for the bits with magic.) And in this I am grateful to my own “web of women”: Judith Bennett, Lillian Faderman, Emma Donoghue, Barbara Hanawalt, Sahar Amer, Bernadette J. Brooten, Lotte C. van de Pol, Harriette Andreadis, Judith Brown, Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Carol J. Clover, Helena Whitbread, Edith Benkov, Jacqueline Murray, and so many others (whom I don’t mean to slight by this very partial listing, nor do I mean to slight the male scholars whose work has been useful).

One of the difficulties of writing the lives of lesbians--whether real or fictional--in history is to situate them in the context of a “community of the mind” of women-identified women. Without that context, it is hard to avoid an endless series of coming-out stories: “What is this thing I’m feeling? I must be the Only One!” That may have been the experience for many women, but when presented as the norm or as the only voice it becomes a dreary disempowering monotony. In writing the Alpennian novels, it was important to me to choose to write from that subset of stories where my characters operate within a history and a community, not only as women but specifically as women who love other women. Historic fiction has a great power to grant the reader a share in ownership of the past. Daughter of Mystery may be meant to entertain, but I hope it also helps claim that ownership.

 

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