Welcome to The Nano Watt Hall of Fame, a thrilling collection of interviews featuring the grand winners of our annual Nano Watt Awards. Delve into the creative lives of our brightest stars as they share their stories of triumph, and their unyielding...
Meet Lucy Stone (@obliviablack). 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 Banbury with her partner and her eight-year-old son, and writes stories in her head when she really ought to be doing other things.
Her novel The Great Ellini won the grand winner prize in The 2023 NanoWatt Awards, in the Historical Fiction Category and follows the transcendent para-romance of Jack Cade and Ellini Syal set against the rich backdrop of 19th century Europe.
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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.
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How does it feel to be a grand winner of the 2023 Nano Watt Awards? Were you confident that you would make it this far in the competition?
It's amazing! And no, I didn't think I would make it this far. The Historical Fiction category was small, but there were some wonderful books in it, so I'm thrilled that The Great Ellini got through!
In your own words what is your winning entry about?
It's a historical fantasy set in the Victorian era, about a man who's had his memories of the woman he loves stolen from him. He then meets her again as a stranger, and has to work out who she is, what she's done, and what she's running from, before her enemies catch up. It's a romance with a detailed fantasy world behind it, and an adorable cast of secondary characters, all contributing their investigations to the central mystery: What has Jack forgotten?
