This happened…

Cover design for Nameless Magery

A very long time ago, in the 1990s, when I was starting graduate school, raising a young child, and working full time, I got an idea for a story from a dream: a young woman was an interloper in a wizardry school for young men. That was all. That was the premise.

But as often happens to me when I’m under stress, I started telling the story to myself, and I liked it. I was working as an office manager for a university-based center, coordinating our move from several locations to one, and when we were all moved I had my own office with my computer screen facing away from the door. I’m good at multitasking, so in my spare moments I drafted the story at work.

When I was finished, I thought it was publishable, and I sent it off to a well-known science fiction publisher. They liked it too. But as often happens, they were overworked and underpaid and one of the editors was having a baby, so they kept telling me my book had promise and they really wanted me to wait. After a year and a half of being obsessed with the mailman (Arthur, who had a hat with ear flaps and was socially awkward to the point of running away if I opened the door when he was on my porch), I asked for the manuscript back and put it in a drawer.

Some years later, a young man who grew up in my neighborhood was chatting with me. He told me he had written a novel, and he told me all about it. After a while, I said I had written one too, and that was when he said he worked for an agent and he got a commission if he found any publishable novels.

I gave the dusty dot-matrix manuscript to him. And the agent, George Scithers, called me the next day, saying, “I have a bone to pick with you.” Apparently he had started reading it intending to toss it aside after a couple of pages, and instead he got caught up in reading it.

He sent the novel to Del Rey. They accepted it and gave me a contract for it and for a sequel, giving me an advance that might have bought a second-hand car if I hadn’t already owned one. In a frenzy, I wrote the sequel, which was already mostly in my head, and they published that one too. The books were combined into a Science Fiction Book of the Month Club offering, translated into Japanese and French, and nominated for a couple of awards whose names I don’t remember now.

And then my mother got ill, and I was the local daughter so I was busy with her as well as with my daughter and a husband who was starting his own business. I finished my master’s degree, got a Ph.D. sort of by accident because I was already there, became a full-time teacher, and took up serious competitive fencing.

I kept writing, of course. I just didn’t somehow get around to publishing anything.

And when I turned around and wrote George a little note saying I had some things for him, I found out he had died since last we talked.

I didn’t have an agent, I hadn’t been published in years, and I was just too busy, plus the part of my brain that values publication is clearly underdeveloped. So I put the thought aside and just kept writing, working, fencing, and doing everything except publishing.

However, people liked the books. I still occasionally get letters from people who have read them. A well-known editor, rejecting a story of mine, mentioned that he knew my books from when he started out in the business. A friend purchased a used copy of one of my books and got me to sign it. And self-publishing got easier and easier.

This past May, I wrote Random House and asked for my rights back. After about three months, I got the one-page letter that says I own my published books again. I formatted the books roughly for Kindle, got an excellent graphic designer to do me some covers, and did some research. And yesterday, I uploaded Nameless Magery. Today, I uploaded Of Swords and Spells, which should be up soon.

Of course, I’ve been working on the third book, The Stick Princess, for a while now, because writing is a thing I do.

My goal is to make at least $9.50 on the books. I originally set a goal of $4.50, but then a friend said she was going to buy a copy so I figured I had better get ambitious.

Yes, there’s something wrong with my brain. I realize that.

10 thoughts on “This happened…

  1. Alison Bradbury says:

    Well, I have my copies of Nameless Magery and Of Swords and Spellsfrom when they were first published and I re-read them every few years, so I’m really looking forward to your new book. All good wishes for the success of these being re-published, they are fine books and deserve it.

    1. DMT says:

      Thank you so much for saying that! I am very happy that you like them and I promise I’ll keep working on the third. It’s the start of the semester from Pandemic Hell so I will get back to the work in progress just as soon as I finish reinventing my teacher education course entirely. Which is why I uploaded the books so hastily—I’m about to get buried. Once again.

  2. Vladimir Zernin says:

    I, too, bought the two volumes when they first came out and have reread them every few years. It’s hard for me to say what is so appealing about them, but I think it’s the mixture of convincingly realized future societies that blend fantasy and silence fiction with characters for whom the author clearly feels a lot of affection. And this is handled exquisitely via first-person narratives by the two heroines who are made to display a certain distance to their own “experiences,” particularly Malka. Somehow this makes the reader feel a great affection for the characters, a difficult feat that not so many writers can carry off.
    In short I hope you are able to get the third volume out before too much more time goes by.
    (Incidentally, for what it’s worth, I have a Ph.D in comparative literature from Yale.

  3. DMT says:

    Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I do like to have affection for my main characters, no matter how difficult they are for the people who have to deal with them.

  4. Gary Hayenga says:

    Hooray! I’ve been wanting an ebook version of Nameless Magery for a decade now. Thanks for finally doing this.

    Yes, I still have paperback copies, but my eyes (and my wife’s eyes) are going and I vastly prefer reading on my iPad. Also, it makes it easier to recommend to other people.

    I would love to see the third book. I hope things get less crazy for you, and all of us, sometime soon and you get a chance to work on it.

    1. DMT says:

      Hi Gary! Thanks for the note. I’m looking forward to the end of the semester so I can write more often. Teaching has a terrible habit of absorbing all my mental energy. Hope things are going well!

  5. Meredith says:

    Every reader has “That book.” The one they have read so many times that they know it by heart and they save it for sick-in-bed days. Nameless Magery is that for me. Thank you so much for this book. I check every so often to see if you have published anything new. I saw and immediately purchased both books for Kindle and followed the link for this site. I am so happy to have found it!

    1. DMT says:

      Oh how lovely to hear that! Thank you. That’s the sort of message that made me realize I should reissue the books.

      I have the third novel in the trilogy mostly drafted, and several other books in the pipeline, so I hope to have it finished in the coming months.

  6. Alan says:

    I love Nameless Magery, and have re-read it a few times over the years. I was looking over my bookshelves when I spotted it again. I decided to check if an ebook is available since I prefer reading those now. I was thrilled to find it, and also that I somehow missed the sequel!? How did I never know about the sequel?
    I’m very excited to read them both. Thank you so much.
    Now coming here I see mention of a third book? This year is already looking better.

    1. DMT says:

      Thank you for the nice note! I’m so glad I got the rights back to the books and self published them—it’s a wonderful thing to be able to do that, especially to make them available for people like you who remember them fondly. I’m finishing up a small writing project now and will be revising the third book in the series next. Hope you’ll like it.

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