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Author bio: Lucy Stone is a freelance writer, lexicographer, and mother of one. Her stories have appeared in many speculative journals, including Dreamforge Magazine, Electric Spec, House of Zolo, and Bards and Sages Quarterly. Most recently, she was published in an anthology of feminist fantasy called Predators in Petticoats. Her major preoccupations are folklore, romance, and mental illness. Her stories contain many villains, but the ultimate one is usually despair, and she will fight it with every word she writes – even prepositions. She studied at Oxford, with which she has a love-hate relationship, and now works on a dictionary, which has a love-hate relationship with her. She lives in the UK with her partner and her eight-year-old son, and writes stories in her head when she really ought to be doing other things.
Story title: The Great Ellini Logline: A descendant of demons in an alternate Victorian Britain must fight to regain his memories when the woman he loves is wrenched out of them.
Premise/Blurb: Eleven years later, in the city of Oxford, he met her again for the first time... In 1870, Jack Cade is admitted to the new-breed stronghold of Pandemonium, a colony of people just like him: descendants of the vanished demon race, all of them extraordinary in little ways, and deranged in much bigger ones. There, he falls in love with Ellini Syal, a shy, insular woman who spends most of her time scampering barefoot over the Edinburgh rooftops. In 1881, he meets her again, but has no idea who she is. All he knows is that there are dark, horribly suggestive gaps in his memory, and that Ellini is running from something she refuses to talk about. Can he work out who she is and what she's done in time to save her from the creatures pursuing her? Can he save himself from the amnesia and the creeping indifference that are eating him up piece by piece? Or is amnesia preferable to the kind of memories he will have to unearth? The Great Ellini is the first book in the epic historical-fantasy-romance The Powder Trail, a series where the past and the present meet, part, and reunite with explosive consequences.
We are so glad that you were interested in telling us something about yourself and your writings! Our first question is; What inspired you to write this book?
This idea, and these characters, have been knocking around in my head since I was a teenager, but I only started writing the story in my thirties. Because of that, the novels are a fun mixture of teenage drama and jaded adulthood! It's hard to think back to my initial sources of inspiration, but I'd definitely cite Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (one of my favourite movies) as inspiration for some of the central questions: Are you the same person without your memories? If you carve someone out of your head, can you also carve them out of your instincts? Will your skin remember things your head can't?
