Thoughts on My Books: Phoenix Rising

PHOENIX RISING

Sixth on the list of my published books is Phoenix Rising. This is the start of my only published epic fantasy, called The Balanced Sword.

Phoenix Rising follows Kyri Vantage, a late-teens young woman whose family appears to be being slowly killed off (first her parents, then a couple years later her brother), and no one, not even the Justiciars of Myrionar -- direct servants of the god of Justice and Vengeance -- seem able to find out who did it, or why. To protect the remaining members of her family, she, her aunt Victoria, and sister Urelle move far, far south to the great city of Zarathanton. But when unpacking, she discovers something that reveals to her that it was the Justiciars THEMSELVES who murdered her family... something that should be utterly impossible, for they are direct servants of a god, and the god cannot act contrary to its nature...

Her quest then brings her together with two other adventurers: Tobimar Silverun, a prince exiled not for doing anything wrong, but being caught up in a family prophecy, and Poplock Duckweed, an intelligent toad with a nose for trouble. 

Phoenix Rising was one of the most important publications for me, as it introduced my world Zarathan, the World of Magic, something I had been working on pretty much continuously since 1977. While Zarathan was also my RPG gaming world, it began as a writing setting -- one that was invented during the process of writing what started as a short story about some people ("the Troglodyte Club") discovering an awesome cave, and ended up as a crossover epic fantasy trilogy.

That original trilogy was, not to put too fine a point on it, terrible, but it set up many of the ideas, locations, people, and overarching concepts that came to define Zarathan. These were refined over the decades, to a large degree by building the world for gaming purposes but also from writing, or trying to write, stories set on that world. 

Phoenix Rising, originally called Fall of Saints (the other two books would have been called Demon, Dragon, Phoenix, Toad and Promise of the Dying God), came originally from the combination of a couple of RPG campaigns. Kyri herself (then named Kyrie Ross) was from a Ravenloft campaign run by Jeffrey Getzin, while Tobimar was from one of the campaigns in Zarathan. Poplock was added because Tobimar's character dynamic used a second, smaller sidekick and the one from the campaign couldn't be used. 

The first draft of Fall of Saints was written in 1991 through 1993, and for a while it appeared it might be published by that new gaming company Wizards of the Coast... but then the tidal wave generated by the intended-to-be-a-side-market Magic: The Gathering forced them to dump all their other activities for a few years. 

Overall, that's a good thing; the original version would've been far, far inferior to what got published. 

I kept tweaking Fall of Saints and the universe for the next twenty years, until I submitted a draft of it to Baen. Kyrie became Kyri because people were more likely to pronounce Kyri correctly; I hadn't realized that "Kyrie" was a common word in certain religious contexts and would be assumed to be pronounced "Keee reee" rather than "K-eye ree, and Ross became Vantage for some in-universe reasons.

The change of title was due to Baen's preference to eliminate anything that had a religious implication, though I was using the term "Saint" in its older sense. That meant I had to rearrange references in the book, as the "Justiciars" used to be called the Saints of Myrionar, and the word Justiciar referred to the investigators/judges/enforcers of the State of the Dragon King. The latter became Adjudicators.

The other major changes driven by Baen were really important structural ones: First, a requirement that if Xavier Ross, a boy from Earth, was to show up at all, he had to play a larger part than I showed. And second, they wanted (since it wasn't clear whether they would publish the second and third books) a clear victory for Kyri at the end that would at least give some form of closure. 

These combined very well to give me the friendship that grew up between Tobimar and Xavier, and the double-finale of the book that really does wrap up the dangers that are close to Kyri's home... except the biggest one that she still cannot identify and that will be the finale of the trilogy.

Overall the Balanced Sword trilogy did surprisingly poorly; the usual rule of thumb is that Fantasy outsells SF by a significant margin, but GCA vastly outsold the Phoenix books. 

I don't think that was due to quality; I'm still very proud of this trilogy and there are parts of it that I'll re-read just because they WORK for me better than much of my other work. But obviously... I'm biased.