I’m beyond thrilled that Seaborn, a novel of mine previously exclusive to Audible, is getting print and ebook editions — and a gorgeous new cover — thanks to the good people at Head of Zeus. I mean, look at this:
Just stunning. It comes out August 1 in the UK, October 1 in the US. New releases of the remaining Seaborn novels will follow soon.
Anyway, I thought it might be worth explaining the relationship between the Seaborn novels and my bestselling audiobook, Black Crow, White Snow, because they share the same characters and something of the same story, but they’re also rather different.
A long time ago, I had a dream. A small group of women stood on a frozen sea, the wind whipping snow across the meager fire they’d made to keep warm. Behind them was a massive, frost-painted ship. Locked in the ice. Broken by it. A slight young man was with them, teeth chattering from the cold water he’d just escaped. One of the women — the one in charge — looked around at them all with both pity and determination. I heard the voice in her head as if it was my own. Helm to the end.
I don’t know how it is for other authors, but a lot of my stories start this way: I wake up with a scene in my head that’s viscerally real, and I have to figure out just what the hell it was. In this case, I wrote an initial short story about the desperate mission this crew was on to find a secret weapon.
Not long after the publication of the third Shards novel — an announcement on that coming soon, I hope! — my agent was approached by Audible.com, wanting to know if I’d write a novella for them. As luck would have it, I’d been fiddling with my ship-in-the-ice story for years, adding more and more depth to the world and characters. I gave it a final polishing, and it appeared as Black Crow, White Snow:
I do love this story, so I was thrilled when it did well.
Very well.
Bestseller-for-a-couple-of-months well.
I was paid a flat fee, so I didn’t get to enjoy riches from that, but it was still pretty amazing. Plus, Audible was pleased enough to ask if I would be interested in writing a series of novels in the world. I answered “Yes” — obviously — because by now I had a much larger story of these characters in mind. I also had a much larger picture of their world, thanks in part to the inadvertent help of N.K. Jemisin and a creative writing class I was teaching around that time. I talk about this in the acknowledgments of the first book that resulted: Seaborn. Here’s the original Audible cover for that, which is still awesome:
In terms of timeline, the events of Seaborn take place before the events of BCWS, which are themselves, um, “echoed” in book two, Iceborn. Here’s the original cover for that (new one to be revealed soon!):
I say “echoed” because a series of novels allows for characters that are far richer, landscapes that are far larger, and stories that are far more complex than what one can get in a single novella. So the story of BCWS within Iceborn may start off in something close to the same way, but it has some very significant differences.
Among them, of course, is how it lays the groundwork for the final book in the trilogy, Stormborn:
I really hope these books reach a bigger audience. The story of Bela has come along way since I first dreamed of her on that frozen moment. And, as it happens, it reaches even further than these three books even show.
Perhaps I’ll get a chance to tell those stories, too, one day. Time will tell.
Helm to the end.