Tuesday, March 20, 2018

The First Day of Spring 2018: War & Grace Release

Over the next few months, I'll be continuing my posts on the Daughter of Light trilogy and its prequel Isolt's Enchantment, but this week I want to post some content about the 10-year (plus) journey I took in arriving at this date of the release of the final installment.

Today, I'll keep things very simple and simply post the Acknowledgments for War & Grace:

The Daughter of Light trilogy is inspired by my beloved grandmother and the transformative effect she had on my life. It is equally inspired by my husband. He has been with me every step of the way since its inception. My grandmother was a gardener, connected to the earth. I didn’t realize until she passed the door she’d opened for me to the natural world. My husband is my heart. These works are from him as much as they are from me because they wouldn’t have existed without his contributions, whether it was finessing a plot point, the technicalities of publishing software, or creating the gorgeous covers.

Rachmi Febrianty, Sheila of Frostbite Publishing, and Brenda Ayala were early readers who stuck with the series through its various incarnations through the end. THANK YOU! Each of your contributions were SIGNIFICANT. In particular, Rachmi insisted on the maps early on and always pressed on details, Sheila pushed for the Black Magic Island dragons to not disappear from the story (as they did in early drafts), and Brenda demanded in the most gracious way that Melia be and grow into a worthy heroine.

Like many (most?) (all?) contemporary fantasy authors, I read Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia as a child and the major Tolkien works (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) as a young teen. It’s common knowledge that Tolkien and Lewis were friends, professional colleagues and that they both professed a personal faith in Christianity which influenced their respective works.

The Lord of the Rings was a huge and direct inspiration for Daughter of Light, but—of course!—changes had to be made. Who wants to retell The Lord of the Rings when it’s already been told so well?

What were the designed changes (made over a decade ago) in Daughter of Light?

1. The protagonist along with a multitude of other major characters are female.
2. While Tolkien’s cosmology pre-dates contemporary history, the Realm of Faerie and the rest of the enchanted world in Daughter of Light exist parallel to the mortal world. There's a (quantum) exchange of energy between the two.
3. The Primal Essence, the Parallel of Shadows, and the Void in Daughter of Light are quantum realms.
4. Language, style of dress, the attitudes and experiences of the characters in Daughter of Light travel much closer to modernity.

Thus, Daughter of Light explores and relies on the newer ideas of quantum mechanics and how reality forms. QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT is at the heart of the story … “quantum entanglement … predicts that changing one particle instantaneously changes the other — even if they are on opposite sides of the galaxy, 100,000 light-years apart.”

While developing the arc of Melia's journey I documented my research on spirituality in the Sunburned blog series on my website. The three most DIRECT contributions came from: Julian of Norwich (I'd never even heard of her before I began this project!) and her theology of love; Kiran Trace and her shared of experience for her own personal spiritual awakening; and John Mark Stroud's vision of a regenerated Planet Earth.

Finally, thank you to the readers. May we all seek and find expressions of mundane, mystical and transformational love in our everyday lives.

Sincerely,
Heidi Garrett

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In a time when the Realm of Faerie and Planet Earth exist in symbiotic union, the epic journey of a young half-faerie woman will transform the future of both worlds ...

My name is Melia Albiana and I stand on the edge of the abyss.
Before I leap, I exhale a breath out of time.
The beauty of the Whole unfurls before me—its intricacy, its complexity, its endurance, its mystery, its majesty.
I am filled with awe.
The universal awareness passes and I am left with the poverty of my personal legacy.
I will die young.
I will die broken.
I will die grief-stricken.
I will die lonely.
And I will die a monster.
I will also die consumed by love.

Whimsical and edgy, Daughter of Light is an epic fantasy with an intriguing cosmology and well-developed characters for readers of all ages.