The Arrows of the Heart by Jeffe Kennedy Book Reveal
A STRANGER’S FAITH
As the Twelve Kingdoms and their
allies are drawn toward war, a princess cast aside must discover a purpose she
never dreamed of…
Karyn af
Hardie behaved like a proper Dasnarian wife. She acquiesced, she accepted, she
submitted. Until her husband gave her a choice: their loveless, unconsummated
royal marriage—or her freedom. Karyn chose freedom. But with nowhere to run
except into the arms of Dasnaria’s enemies, she wonders if she’s made a
mistake. She wants love, security, a family. She can’t imagine finding any of
it among the mercurial Tala.
Worst of
all is Zyr. The uninhibited shapeshifter is everywhere she looks. He’s magnetic,
relentless, teasing and tempting as if she’s free to take her pleasure where
she wishes. As if there isn’t a war rising before them, against a vile and
demanding force far stronger than they. But with Karyn’s loyalty far from
certain, Zyr offers her only chance to aid the defense—a dangerous gambit to
seek out a land not seen in centuries, using clues no one can decipher.
Together, they’ll have every opportunity to fail—and one chance to steal
something truly precious…
Releasing October 2018Buy links will be added to the bookpage once available:
Spotlight on Maps
Ever wondered how authors draw their maps? Jeffe Kennedy shares how the maps to her world are created.
Fantasy – and its subgenres –
are well known for having maps. There’s even a Fantasy Maps Twitter feed that
sometimes features maps from my books.
Some authors create their
maps before they do anything else. In fact, many SFF authors spend considerable
time building their worlds before they write their stories.
Not me.
Because I’m more of a
gardener than an architect – George R.R. Martin’s analogy for different
approaches to pre-plotting stories or not – I tend to discover the world as I
write. I see it through my characters’ eyes.
That means that, when I wrote
THE MARK OF THE TALA, the first book in The Twelve Kingdoms and The Uncharted
Realms series, I could see the landscape in my head. Through my heroine Andi’s
eyes, I saw what she observed and learned what she did. When she left the
castle she’d grown up in, I discovered the greater world along with her.
It was only when my editor
suggested that a map would help readers, that I set myself to drawing one.
I can draw some. I took art
classes in school and even had occasional pieces in student art shows. My
skills are passable, but fall far short of my writing abilities. Still, I
wanted to try to draw the map myself.
I pulled a bunch of fantasy
novels from my bookshelf and laid them all out, pages propped open with
weights, and studied how they were drawn. I picked the elements I liked best
and ruthlessly imitated them. (A skill all art students learn early!) I worked
on a big pad of paper – 18 x 24 inches – with mechanical pencils and erasers. It
took me a few drafts, but I soon had a landscape that matched what my
characters saw – and how long it took them to get from one place to another.
I carefully inked in this map
and mailed it to my editor, figuring they could scale it down to trade paperback
size.
One problem: all the
carefully lettered names of places that looked so great on my 18 x 24” map?
They dwindled to illegibility when reduced. So did a lot of my landmark lines.
So, I had to redraw it small.
This time I worked on an 8 x
10” piece of paper, which – turned to landscape orientation – happens to be the
size of two pages of a trade paperback book. My editor also asked me to put a
1” break down the middle, for binding. You’d think I’d have thought about these
things ahead of time, but no.
Redrawing the map didn’t take
long, however, and that gave me the opportunity to tweak a few aspects of it.
That map appeared in all three books of the Twelve Kingdoms trilogy, THE MARK
OF THE TALA, THE TEARS OF THE ROSE, and THE TALON OF THE HAWK. My publisher
decided not to include it in the next two books, the ones that started The
Uncharted Realms series: THE PAGES OF THE MIND and THE EDGE OF THE BLADE. When
I continued that series on my own, I included my original map, and also the
expansion of the world, in THE SHIFT OF THE TIDE.
For this new release, THE
ARROWS OF THE HEART, I considered adding to the map, but was concerned that it
would be a spoiler for the story. So that version will appear in the next book.
I might draw it on the big
paper first.
About Jeffe Kennedy
Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning
author whose works include novels, non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. She
has been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council
Fellowship for Poetry, and was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award.
Her award-winning fantasy romance
trilogy The
Twelve Kingdoms
hit the shelves starting in May 2014. Book 1, The Mark of the Tala, received a starred Library
Journal review and was nominated for the RT Book of the Year while the sequel, The Tears of the Rose received a Top Pick Gold and was
nominated for the RT
Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2014. The third book, The Talon of the Hawk, won the
RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2015. Two more books followed in this
world, beginning the spin-off series The
Uncharted Realms.
Book one in that series, The Pages of the Mind, has also been nominated for the
RT Reviewer’s Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2016 and won RWA’s 2017 RITA®
Award. The second book, The Edge of the Blade, released December 27, 2016, and
is a PRISM finalist, along with The Pages
of the Mind. The next in the series, The Shift of the Tide, will be out in August, 2017. A
high fantasy trilogy taking place in The
Twelve Kingdoms world is forthcoming from Rebel Base books in 2018.
She also introduced a new fantasy
romance series, Sorcerous
Moons, which
includes Lonen’s War,
Oria’s Gambit,
The Tides of BÃ ra,
and The Forests of Dru. She’s begun releasing a new
contemporary erotic romance series, Missed
Connections, which started with
Last Dance and continues in With a Prince.
In 2019, St. Martins Press will
release the first book, The Orchid Throne,
in a new fantasy romance series, The
Forgotten Empires.
Her other works include a number of
fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A
Covenant of Thorns;
the contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets
of Passion;
an erotic contemporary serial novel, Master
of the Opera;
and the erotic romance trilogy, Falling
Under,
which includes Going
Under, Under His Touch and Under Contract.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
with two Maine coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome
Doctor of Oriental Medicine.
Jeffe can be found online at her
website: JeffeKennedy.com, every Sunday at the popular SFF Seven blog, on Facebook, on Goodreads and pretty much constantly on
Twitter @jeffekennedy. She is represented by Sarah
Younger of Nancy Yost Literary Agency.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1014374.Jeffe_Kennedy
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