Thoughts on My Books 2: Diamonds Are Forever

My second published novel (barely a novel, at 43,000 words) was Diamonds Are Forever, published as 1/3 of the Baen anthology Mountain Magic, alongside Kuttner's Hogben stories and David Drake's Old Nathan stories (in ebook form, they had to replace the Hogben stories with, I think, John the Balladeer from Manley Wade Wellman).

This was also my first collaboration with Eric Flint. He wanted a modern-setting "backwoods" story to fit with the other two selected parts of the anthology, and his idea was of a young man with a city fiancee bringing her home and trying not to let her find out exactly what the Big Family Secret was. Between the two of us we hammered out the general outline and ideas, and then I went ahead and wrote it. 

In Diamonds, Clint Slade is bringing his fiancee Jodi home to meet his family... but despite assurances by his mother, it turns out that Something Is Happening, and the strange underground beings that have been the family secret have suddenly turned hostile. But there is much more to it than that, and both Clint and Jodi find that they may be the only people who can prevent the devastation of the Eastern USA.

This story also gave me something of a foretaste of the research that I'd end up having to do for my other Eric Flint collaborations, in that significant parts of the story involve the cave systems and geology of Kentucky, and I worked to get anything that WASN'T supposed to be pure fiction as accurate as I could manage. 

Clint and to some extent Jodi drew on something of the same narrative well as Digital Knight; both were modern-day fantasy, both are first-person narratives, and both Clint and Jason are techie-types. Jodi is rather flamboyantly different, to a great extent because Eric Flint requested I make her very emphatically Jewish, in the old-school New York tradition. I did the best I could with that (probably pretty clumsily) and he was the one who wrote up the background for her that made her particular quirks at least believable if not likely. 

The key creatures of the book, the Nowethada and Lisharithada, were entirely my invention, as was the more serious part of the plotline. I wrote about 95% of the story (I can pretty easily point to the places Eric did the writing or modification). 

This story was written to be able to stand alone, although it also is compatible with the Paradigms Lost universe and I'm currently looking at the best way to integrate Clint and Jodi, if I go forward with that idea. 

It is effectively a short, standalone novel, and thus is a good quick intro to my general style of writing, and occasional sense of humor.