Lesley Smith is joining us today with her novel The Changing of the Sun. Here’s the publisher’s description.
The world is shifting and only the blind have eyes to see it.
In a seaside village, a woman has come back from the dead, the only survivor of a tsunami which wiped out her clan. When she speaks, it is of things no Kashinai should know. She says danger is coming and only an Oracle can save them…one who has not yet been called.
In Aiaea, a city infected by fear, a priestess finds herself blind and afraid. Denied her mantle, Saiara is imprisoned by the woman who should have been her teacher. What Saiara has seen cannot be stopped and unless she acts, an entire world and its people will burn.
Their only safety lies in sacred caverns far to the north, but first Saiara must escape captivity with only the aid of a former High Oracle, a healer, a bondservant, and a Seaborn woman who is indwelt by the goddess of death.
Oracle and indwelt, healer and nomad, child and adult…the Changing of the Sun is coming. Will they be ready? Will you?
The Changing of the Sun is the first installment of a breath-taking trilogy that spans lifetimes and ages from veteran journalist turned author Lesley Smith.
What’s Lesley’s favorite bit?
LESLEY SMITH
Finding your favourite bit of your debut novel is hard. I don’t write in order so it took me a while to really look at the final narrative and fine one thread I truly loved. Of course, once I saw it, it was completely obvious. It’s a minor arc belonging to a character called Nahris. She’s a bondservant, an indentured slave to a minor merchant, who escapes her master to join the final waves of the Great Exodus on a world about to be ravaged by a cataclysmic solar storm.
In February, as I was finishing up the final draft of The Changing of the Sun, I did a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds to pay for the e-book costs, including editing and a trilogy’s worth of beautiful covers by Jason Gurley. Doing this took a lot of work and effort, as well as a lot of soul-searching on the nature of crowd-funding and a desire to be open and honest as possible. I’m retired, blind and living on a very low income so a funded Kickstarter meant I’d able to publish the book in six months rather than a year. Anyway, I accrued some amazing backers—sixty two of them in fact—and most of them I don’t know. The whole thing was a rollercoaster of ecstatic and terrifying emotions which reminded me the world is filled with amazing people, many of whom I’m now privileged to know.
The Sunday the campaign funded, I spent the day hammering the net and raised the last £440 ($725) I needed in twelve hours. A family member, lacking understanding of the modern world and the concept of crowdfunding, had just accused me of begging for money and I hadn’t taken it very well.
My one fault is that, if someone tells me I can’t do something, then I do it just to spite them. The same applies when someone tells me I’m doing it wrong; I will do things right and I will do them well. Because I can, because I’m stubborn and it got me through uni, it allowed me to survive being a journalist and now it just keeps me semi-sane.
I hit Twitter and Facebook and I raised the money. Changing funded that evening and I promised whomever pushed me over the £1250 funding goal would get a bonus Tuckerisation. A friend of mine, whom I don’t see nearly enough of, raised her pledge not once but twice. She didn’t want the fictionalisation but she did want me to succeed.
Changing is out because of her and the people like her. That’s where Nahris came from, originally she was a placeholder character with a name which sounded good as it rolled across my tongue. Through my friend’s selflessness, she allowed me the freedom to follow Nahris’ journey, I wanted her to have a micro-arc but for it to still be important. To matter in the narrative, even though she’s not a seer or anyone special, she’s just a servant who decided to escape and could smell doom on the air.
We meet Nahris over half way through the story and Saiara has quit the city with her band of faithful followers. I know that when decisions are made, when exoduses happen, not everyone agrees or chooses to leave. Rather than Nahris’ simply staying (I left that dubious honour to Jashri, the former High Oracle who next life will be haunted by screams and water) I wondered what would happen if the last wave got lost and took the wrong road?
What if, rather than going right and following Saiara’s caravan through the desert on the Oasis Road, they instead went left and chose the River Road? Nahris became my viewpoint character for a tragedy of heart-rending proportions and while her part in the story is brief but I actually didn’t know how her arc was going to end. When it finished, her demise snuck up on me so quickly, I cried.
She was marked out from the start as a dead girl walking, she was never going to survive but her death surprised me. It also broke my heart.
Nahris followed people who wanted to live but instead made a stupid mistake and stuck with them because that’s what we all do, we cling to our own and hope it’s going to be okay. The herd mentality offers safety but also invites doom, a scant chapter’s worth of misery and fleeting thoughts as a girl makes the wrong choice for the right reasons. Not everyone gets to live, not in any story and that’s why this is my favourite bit of The Changing of the Sun.
LINKS:
BIO:
Lesley Smith worked as a journalist for nearly a decade before reinventing herself as an author of science fiction and fantasy. She lives in a quaint Norfolk town with three cats and her guide dog, Unis.
She is currently crowdfunding the sequel, The Parting of the Waters, and is asking everyone—rather than buying her book on Amazon—to pledge to her Kickstarter instead and get a signed paperback or e-copy that way.
