She should have killed it the moment she found it.
But she didn’t. Killing is what orcs are known for. But when a nameless orcs finds an injured gnome in her nest, an impulse towards mercy catapults them both into a desperate odyssey through a multi-racial city.
Wizards and clandestine societies contend, faceless armies clash in the night and races and nations are drawn into the search for a stolen talisman of ultimate power, all at the behest of a mysterious puppet master.
The orc’s trength and savagery are worthless to her in a world of shadows and deception. Instead, she and her new companion must navigate a cryptic landscape of ever changing rules.
In order to save them both, the orc must master the ultimate game and solve the riddle of the magical object known as The Luck.
Do you like it?
That’s my first attempt at a blurb for my upcoming novel, The Luck, from Five River’s Press.
The Luck is a sequel to The Mermaid’s Tale. Actually, it’s a prequel. The setting is this multi-racial fantasy city where goblins and dwarves, trolls and giants, vampires, humans and others all live alongside each other. They don’t exactly live in harmony, they’re all distinct cultures and races, and sometimes it’s a struggle.
They’re not really fantasy races. The dwarves don’t sing, the vampires are closer to the masai people than they are to Dracula. Rather, they’re different species, and each develops their own culture, their own world view. For each race, they have a challenge – How do we raise the next generation? How do we ensure that there is a next generation? The answers to that question turn out very differently, if you are two feet tall, or twelve. What you get are all these different people, who really only see themselves as people, who develop different cultures, technologies, relationships. And in the city, they’re forced to confront beings who are both like and unlike themselves, people who aren’t people… or maybe they are.
The central character is the Arukh (Orc). In The Mermaid’s Tale, she’s a monster, summoned to hunt a murderer, who discovers the world’s first serial killer. As she hunts the killer through a city where the races don’t even acknowledge each other, she finds herself developing humanity and compassion. She becomes the only one who cares about stopping the killer.
The reviews were very kind – Someone called it a fable of personhood, another called it the best existential novel they’d read. Someone else even had a theory that it was so good, I must be some other much better and more famous writer publishing under a fake name, that was my favourite.
The Luck takes place earlier in her life. Incidents and events in this novel are referred to in distorted form in The Mermaid’s Tale. It’s earlier in her moral development. The creature she is at the end of The Mermaid’s Tale is different than who she was at the beginning. And the creature she will be at the end of the Luck will be the person she was at the beginning of The Mermaid’s Tale.
If this works out, I’ll do another novel, The War which will be a prequel to The Luck and The Mermaid’s Tale. And that would be pretty interesting.
But anyway, The Luck is closing in on me. It’ll be out this year.
I had to write up a bio last week. And the week before, I had to write a teaser for my next novel in the series to be included with this one.
The next novel? Why don’t we see if this one sells at all before we look at the next one? I appreciate that Lorina, my publisher, seems to have more faith than I do. But gee whiz, she works so hard, I feel almost ashamed. I’d like the books to be able to justify that faith.
And apparently soon, I’m going to have to talk to an artist named Jeff about the cover. I’m not looking forward to that. Literary people and visual artists don’t necessarily speak the same language.
So The Luck is just bearing down. In a few months it will be out there in the world. Tick tock, tick tock.
Feels kind of weird.
I’ll need to figure out what to do to help promote it, to try and get it out into the world, and into peoples hands.
I’ll have to hope they like it.
So… what did you think of the blurb.
The blurb works. It grabs the reader by the throat and never let’s him (or her) go.