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There's a new Alpennia story out in the world! The anthology Lace and Blade 4, edited by Deborah J. Ross, includes "Gifts Tell Truth", a story taken from Jeanne's early adulthood during the French occupation of Alpennia.

In The Mystic Marriage, Vicomtesse Jeanne de Cherdillac tells another character, ‘I have loved—truly loved—only four women. One of them is dead. One never found the courage to say either yes or no. You were the third.’ When I wrote those words, I knew relatively little about those first two women, but I had the first inkling that Jeanne might have some interesting stories to tell. This is not the story of either that first or second love, but of the time between them when grief and regret had not yet been replaced by archness and a cultivated sophistication.

The volume includes stories by many other great authors:
This collection of stories of swashbuckling romance is a perfect gift for Valentine's Day -- either for yourself or for someone you love (in addition to buying it for yourself, of course).

hrj: (Alpennia w text)

Deborah J. Ross, the editor of Lace and Blade 4, is posting a series of interviews with the contributors as a lead up to the book's release on February 14, 2018. (Have you pre-ordered yet?) This week, my interview went up. Check it out for some background on how I came to write "Gifts Tell Truth" and general chat about my writing.

I'm excited to have an Alpennia story published in a mainstream SFF context. Although I have a number of pieces of Alpennia short fiction planned, what I don't have is a clear plan for how to get them to readers. "Three Nights at the Opera" was always a free giveaway from the start, in part because I wanted to have an appetizer to offer people who'd never read anything of mine. And I have plans to make advance access to Alpennia shorts one of the benefits of subscribing to my mailing list, especially for the pieces that are more in the way of character sketches rather than free-standing stories. But the weird neither-this-nor-that nature of the series makes it hard to identify potential publication venues. In essence, "Gifts Tell Truth" was written specifically for the theme of Lace and Blade. The specific story wasn't one I'd been planning to write all along.

The eventual end-game, once the series as a whole is complete, will be to put out all the short fiction in a convenient collection, but that's quite a ways down the road.

What "fill-in" stories would you love to read about Alpennia? Especially if I'm not constrained to telling stories centering on the lesbian characters?

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