Silent Blade

Silent Blade is a short story coming to you from Samhain Publishing.

(I want to be very clear: it’s not a novel.  It’s slightly longer than Mere Formality.)

What’s the story behind the short story?

Well, I occasionally binge on Harlequin Presents category romances (HP).  Things with titles like Billionaire’s Pregnant Virgin Mistress. Sometimes when you write for a living, reading actually becomes a chore.  With HP’s I just completely turn off my editor and enjoy the emotional melodrama.  I’m not the only one.  At some point during this endless Kate 4 writing, I had a conversation with Meljean Brook, which went something like this:

Me: …so aside from horrible dreams, I’m all good.

Meljean: What sort of horrible dreams?

Me: I dreamed that I gave birth to three boys and they all died.

Meljean:  I’m sending you a box of 50 HPs today!

Unfortunately HP’s no longer work – I burned out.  But anyway, during summer I was reading HP’s.  One day I was in BN watching the kids scour manga shelves and I heard this:

I had to have it.  When I was a teenager, I devoured adventure novels of Old West.  They presented this vision of Mexico and Old West that I found incredibly fascinating and that persisted through education and adulthood.  It’s this make-belief New World that never was, where Mayne Reid’s Headless Horseman is riding and H. Rider Haggard’s Aztec Princess tragically sacrifices herself to secure victory against the Conquistadors, and Captain Blood is sailing his pirate flotilla. (To this day, if Zorro comes on TV, everything stops.)  Somehow this song tapped into that exotic place in my head.

It took half an hour to get the album.  Nobody knew where the album was.   But I finally got it.

That night Gordon made me watch Godfather for about the fortieth time.  I compounded this by reading Mario Puzo’s Last Don again and somehow all of this combined to produce a futuristic romance.  Don’t ask me how.

The story was written in about two days and I planned it as a world primer, a sort of sketch.  The world is very lush, a place of bright flowers, pink wine, and too many pastries.  The people are tan and dark-haired, this odd mix of Spanish, Italian, and Mexican cultures.  Socially, it’s a mafia in SF setting: biologically enhanced families battling for influence.  The plot is HP.  There is an alpha male, who is an ass, and a wronged woman who will make him grovel in the end.

It sounds like a mess, and it probably is, but if the readers like it, I would write more in the world.  So I ask that if you do decide to buy it, please drop me a line after you read it, so I’ll know what you thought about it.