Jeff King: Tell Us About Your Novels

Jeff King asked: how many novels have you written, and would you mind posting up some of the synopsis with genre and word count...

I have complete a draft of at least three novels.

The first one I wrote was called An Unknowing Vow and it was a Regency romance intended to follow the style of the incomparable Georgette Heyer. It only ran about 60K words and involved what all romances involve. Naturally, it had cats, a friend who was hilarious (for our hero) and seven aunts pushing our hero into marriage. It also had an evil doer, a ridiculous "standard Barbara Cartland" hero and an idiot heroine to go with it as a contrast to my main characters. It was a learning experience and did a great deal to help me work on characters and dialog. The plot, however, stunk and it's in desperate need of a rewrite. I know what I want to do, but it hasn't been a priority.

The first novel I feel I've "finished" is The Curse of the Jenri, which was based, loosely, on a short story I got published in the now defunct PLOT magazine, "Code of the Jenri." This novel, which is a true sword and sorcery fantasy novel, involves a loose organization of women and their mates, the Jenri, who cannot have male children, have ties to their founder hundreds of years before, have a rigid code of ethics. They also have a mystique where I combine aspects of Amazons, ninjas and Native Americans because, hey, I'm like that. I wanted to turn the tide on the hackneyed damsel-in-distress concept and challenge many of those old stereotypes. And I wanted it to be funny. I think I succeeded at least in that. It's ~130,000 words.

The last novel I finished (which still needs polishing) is Beast Within, a combination science fiction/fantasy combining elements of both, but also a castaway theme, except there's a great bunch of them. Again, I like to play with societal stereotypes and mores and address not just prejudice but the fear of prejudice and how the fear of being viewed as a monster can make you one. It's about 93,000 words.

I have perhaps another ten or so novels in various states of completion, at least have a dozen or so with more than ten chapters. I have a screenplay that I completed that could also use a revamp (or trash heap), some plays based on original fairy tales I've written, some fairy stories I've written and a large number of short stories.

So, there you have it.

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