The Swordspoint Series

My first novel, Swordspoint, was set in a city that remains nameless to this day. Despite that, I have never found it difficult to find my way there, and now have three novels and a growing collection of short stories set in that place. I invite you to join me there.

The setting is an unnamed city, the capital of an unnamed city-state currently ruled by a Council of Lords which overthrew the monarchy long ago. Some readers call the city “Riverside,” but that’s just the name of the little island in the river in the middle of the city where Swordspoint‘s protagonists live. It’s inspired by all the cities I have read about, studied, and walked in, and loved the best: Elizabethan London, 18th century Paris, 1980s New York, and many others both real and fictional…

The world and its people were introduced to readers in the very first short story I ever published professionally. I was living on West 110th Street, on Manhattan’s gloriously crumbling Upper West Side. In those days, it was a tough, edgy place: today’s luxury condos were then SRO’s for guys who howled on the street at night and girls who charged by the hour, or cramped refuges for new immigrants, or the rundown, low-rent warrens of scholars, actors and musicians. I adored it. But I wondered what it would be like to be able to walk those streets without always having to look over my shoulder to see who might be behind me.

I was reading a lot of Fritz Leiber’s “Lankhmar” stories then, some Sherlock Holmes, and had just discovered the Regency of Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond books, and raunchy Blue Boy Magazine… So “Red-Cloak” featured the swordsman Richard St. Vier and his acerbic companion Alec, walking unscathed through a dangerous, rundown urban district called Riverside.

But every time I tried to write another Riverside story, people told me it read like a chapter from a novel. So after many false starts and much agony, I finally managed to get a first draft of Swordspoint. I revised like crazy, and finally sold the book (first to Unwin Hyman in London, then to William Morrow in New York), and then watched the fur fly about whether or not it was really fantasy at all! (My answer, if you’re curious, was to help found the Interstitial Arts Foundation, encouraging work that defies genre expectations… but that’s another story for another time.)

I never intended to write anything else with the same characters or setting. But I changed my mind, as I explained here.

With my having found the way back to Riverside, there followed a few more short stories, including a novella about Alec’s posthumous son Theron which Delia Sherman and I wrote together. It was the genesis of our novel The Fall of the Kings, which takes place about 60 years after Swordspoint (see Chronology). Delia was curious about aspects of the city and the world that Swordspoint had only touched on: Its ancient past, its University… Together, we filled in many of those blanks, and had a fabulous time doing it!

The next novel to be published, The Privilege of the Sword, actually takes place about fifteen years after Swordspoint, long before The Fall of the Kings. I’d begun it years previously, then put it in a drawer. It took an ailing visitor from the Antipodes to get it going again . . . I’ll let her tell you about it.

So I got back to work on The Privilege of the Sword, the story of Alec’s niece Katherine and her journey of self-determination, aided by her crazy uncle. It was utterly fun to write; my biggest problem was coming up with a title for it—as I explain in my essay, “The Naming of Books is a Difficult Matter.” When TPotS was published, it was nominated for a dizzying range of awards, ranging from Romance to Gender Exploration.

So: Three novels published out of order, a lot of short stories to fill in the gaps between.

In 2011, my old friend Julian Yap came to me about his latest venture, a company called Serial Box, that would publish online serial stories with a plot arc: It was going to be “the HBO of e-books!” At first I was dubious about doing one set in the Swordspoint world, but once we decided that our story would be set well before the events of the novel, I enthusiastically agreed to put together a team of co-writers and get to work. 

Tremontaine tells the story of how a young girl named Diane becomes the magnificent Duchess Tremontaine, entangling the lives of a big cast of characters, including Ixkaab Balaam, a swordswoman from a family of chocolate traders from across the sea; her lover Tess the Hand, the greatest forger in Riverside; Micah Heslop, a math genius from a family of turnip farmers . .  . A few of the Swordspoint characters do show up, younger but just as dangerous, including town beauty Asper Lindley (not yet Lord Horn), the daring swordsman Vincent Applethorpe, and even a fiercely independent toddler of the Campion family.

Finding writers to work with was a dream. I gathered people who already knew and loved the books, whose own writing I admired, and who would think it was fun to sit in a room together for a three-day weekend, hashing out the plots and characters for each season of thirteen novellas. Then we’d horse trade for who got to write which story, go home and write elaborate outlines for each one, making sure they all fit together in sequence . . . It was a huge amount of work, and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard at a Slack channel. Over the four seasons, my co-writers included Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Karen Lord, Tessa Gratton, Joel Derfner, and more. In addition to playing in my sandbox, each brought their own particular passions and knowledge to my world, making it much, much brighter.

I was also deep in the audiobook world at the time, so I convinced Julian to commission audio of each episode. We were lucky to be able to get audio star Katherine Kellgren, who’d played Diane in the audiobook of Swordspoint, and the fabulous Nick Sullivan (Ferris in Swordspoint; Basil in The Fall of the Kings), and gifted newcomer Sarah Mollo-Christensen, all ably directed and edited by the multi-talented Amanda Rose Smith, who also composed the audio series’ music.

A few years later, when Serial Box changed to Realm, the focus shifted entirely to audio! And that’s the form you will find the series available in today. (We did get one season in print: the first one.)