THE LION

The seal and statuette at the top of the page indicate that THE LION WON the Origins Award for Best Game-Related Novel.  (My first Origins win on my second nomination!)

Aside from the birth of my children and my wedding, I have had few more thrilling moments in my life than winning that award.   It was made even more sweet by the fact that I didn't know about the win right away.  I was at a comic convention at the time the prize was given out.  (Thanks to my pal Jeff Grubb for accepting for me!)  When I got home, I assumed I'd been passed over -- only to get an e-mail from Don Perrin the next day informing me that I'd won!   (Thanks, Don!)

The statuette is the one that adorns the top of this page and the front of this web site.  She's very beautiful, though I don't dust her often enough.

THE LION was a very tricky book to write.  I had to advance the stories of the main characters (Toturi and Tsuko) and, at the same time, bring the entire L5R series to a climax.  This meant involving something like a dozen major characters and another dozen important supporting characters.   Unfortunately, this meant that -- in some ways -- I had to short the Lion clan, who were supposed to be the stars of the book.

The complexity of the game "history" also caused a number of problems at this point, too.  There was just a hell of a lot going on, and not all of it made sense from a book point of view.   (Though it would have been fine in a game setting.)

Anyway, I did my best to bring all the elements together and make them a satisfying conclusion.  Then the new continuity folks (they always seemed to be changing, which made them nearly impossible to please) would go through my MS and rip me a new one.

In the end, I fought as many battles as I could stand to fight.  I tried to give them their way when they were "right," and work around them the rest of the time.  Mostly, I think I succeeded.

The climax of the story was both thrilling to write and sad, because some characters I'd come to love would be leaving the story permanently.  I tried to give them all a good finish to their storylines.

And, despite the struggles, I must have done something right, because -- as noted previously -- I got this very cool award for the book.  (And much thanks to all the L5R fans who voted for The Lion that year!)

Sometimes, I miss the L5R universe.   Probably, I'll do some samurai stories of my own one day.

The reason I'm not doing more L5R is simply that no one's asked.  The publishers, it seems, have an unwritten rule about working for them -- you can only do one "universe" at a time.  Right now, my wagon is parked in the DragonLance milieu.  Whether I'll get to do more L5R, only time will tell.

You can buy THE LION at Amazon by clicking on the title at left.