Hi Everyone!

Star Wars Day has already come and gone, and Towel Day is coming right up! Those are both great holidays celebrating great fantasy (let’s be honest: Star Wars and Hitchhiker’s Guide are both fantasy) worlds, but I want to take a moment to celebrate one of my personal favorite fantasy worlds: Terre d’Ange.

Terre d’Ange is the world where the Kushiel’s Legacy series is set. If you haven’t read those books yet, I advise you to run, not walk, to your closest physical or digital bookstore and get them right away.

Although–wait! They can be a bit…racy. Or maybe more than a bit racy. So bear that in mind as you’re racing to get your hands on them.

If the thought of all that raciness intimidates you, I have good news! The first book in the series, Kushiel’s Dart, has a companion novel, Cassiel’s Servant, which retells the story but from a different point of view. A point of view that skips over most of the racy bits of the original.

That might sound disappointing, but I found Cassiel’s Servant to possess much of the magic of the original, and I sped through it with bated breath, even though I already knew exactly what was going to happen in every scene! If that’s not a sign of good writing, I don’t know what is. I’ve been disappointed in a lot of my fiction reading lately, but Cassiel’s Servant restored my faith in fantasy. I’d been worrying that I’d lost the ability to enjoy fantasy novels, but now I know it’s not me, it’s them, with “them” meaning all those disappointing books I’d read recently.

What about you? Have you read anything set in Terre d’Ange? What’s your favorite of the books in that world?

Speaking of retellings from other points of view, I’ve done something sort of similar. I wrote a short story prequel to The Midnight Land from Boleslav Vlasiyevich’s point of view for my upcoming Kickstarter. If you’d like to check out a sneak peek of it, you can do so here. This story will only be available on Kickstarter, but for the low low price of $1, so if you’d like to grab it, I recommend signing up to be notified on the launch of the campaign (hit the button on the Kickstarter preview page that says “Notify me on launch”). That way you’ll be, well, notified on launch, which means you can be an early bird backer if you so desire (following the campaign does NOT mean backing it, so there’s no risk in doing so–you get to choose whether or not to back it once it goes live) and thereby qualify for special rewards like a live video call with me and my artist, Madison.

Let me know if you’ll be celebrating Towel Day, if you’re a fan of Terre d’Ange, and if you have any questions about the Kickstarter. And happy reading!

E.P.