As we prepare for the launch of the Deluxe Halfblood Chroncles next week, the team is thrilled to share a complete, hour-long interview with Mercedes Lackey!

In it, she shares the history of the Halfblood Chronicles, discusses her working process with Andre Norton, and explains how numbering pages saved the entire manuscript when the original got lost in shipping!


 Mercedes Lackey — The Halfblood Chronicles

Interviewed by Ben Dobyns · August 2026

BEN   My name is Ben Dobyns, and among many other things, I've been working with you — and you'll introduce yourself in a minute — for a number of years now on all of the cool crowdfunding projects, and fan interface, and making communities, and all the cool stuff. And you are, of course…

MISTY   I'm, of course, Mercedes Lackey, author of many books.

BEN   One or two.

MISTY   Yeah, 142.

BEN   Yeah, and counting.

MISTY   Keep crunching, we'll make more.

BEN   That's right. And so you wrote — have now four books in kind of the universe of Elvenbane, and the first one of those books came out in 1991.

MISTY   Yep.

BEN   That was Elvenbane, and then we had Elvenblood in 1995, and Elven— oh my gosh, I'm gonna get it wrong. I keep getting the number two. And Elvenborn, and then Elvenbred. There we go. Did I get it right? I think I got it right.

MISTY   I think so.

BEN   Okay. Out of 142 books, part of what I've been astonished about is, I'll ask you the most obscure questions about something you wrote 30 years ago, and you go, "Oh yeah, this, and then this, and then this." It's quite impressive.

MISTY   Sometimes. Sometimes I'll go, "I don't remember." It's a lot to keep in my head.

BEN   I'll warn you today, we're gonna talk about Elvenborn, but I have at least one question about Joust.

MISTY   Oh sure, because we all love dragons.

BEN   Exactly. And, well, actually, let's start there, because this has come up in some fan conversations from the folks on the Discord, asking about — because these books were a little bit contemporary — some of the differences between the dragons in Halfblood, which are very intelligent, extremely magical creatures that can shapeshift, versus the dragons in Joust, which are maybe not quite as smart. More like…

MISTY   The dragons in Joust are all based on raptors. It's raptor behavior, and the dragons that are incubated in sands are based mostly on, I'd say, golden eagles. The ones that are incubated in hot mud, the swampy dragons, they're based on the buteo species of the hawks. And that's for the Joust dragons.

BEN   Yeah, that's the Joust dragons. Okay, because the dragons in Halfblood are quite different.

MISTY   Very much so.

BEN   One of the things that came up in conversation, people were saying, "Oh wow, had dragons ever been shapeshifters before Andre and Misty wrote this?" I'm pretty sure they were, but I don't know how new the concept was. Because, you know, we'd had dragons as shapeshifters in, like, second edition D&D. But could you talk a little bit about that?

MISTY   Yeah, I think they were in D&D, but I wasn't playing D&D at that point. I was too busy working.

BEN   Right.

MISTY   So I probably was not aware of the shapeshifting dragons in D&D.

BEN   Okay, so that may have just independently converged on this. Would be super cool.

MISTY   Yeah, it's sort of independent, but I don't know how similar they are to the shapeshifters in D&D. At least I had a mechanism for the shapeshifting.

BEN   Right. As opposed to, it just happens. It's just magic. Okay, so let's shift directly over to the origins of Elvenbane and the relationship with Andre. How did you two meet? How did the project come about?

MISTY   Well, I had sent her fan letters back in the day. And she actually remembered it when we met as professionals. But what happened was, she had dumped her old agent and gotten my agent. And my agent said, "Well, why don't you do a collaboration?" It was just that simple. So we went down to Florida and we discussed this. We decided we wanted to do something with dragons. And we wanted to do something with elves that were evil, because there hadn't been any evil elves at that point — at least not in contemporary fantasy literature that I know of. So we decided we wanted to do something like that, and went down to Florida, and she and I hammered out the basic idea and the outline for the first book. I went back home. And this was — she was just barely computer literate. So we did this old school. I would do about two or three chapters. I'd print them out, ship them to her by mail. And I made triple spaced margins so she could write in the margins. She would write whatever she wanted in the margins, ship it back to me, and I would type all that back in in the computer. And then when we had finished the rough draft of the manuscript, I printed the whole thing out again, sent it back to her. She did the same thing. And I put it in, sent it back to her again. She approved it and we called it done. Old school. Old, old school. As opposed to her, where when she was first starting, she typed everything out. And then when there were corrections from her editors, she had to literally cut pieces out of manuscript and move them around and glue— tape them down to the page, or hand write stuff if she wasn't shifting whole paragraphs or something like that. I've seen some of her old manuscripts and it's just so labor-intensive. And then she was making enough money to hire a typist. So she hand wrote it, sent it to the typist, the typist typed it up, and then she went through a whole thing all over again with corrections.

BEN   It reminds me of — I had an opportunity years ago to look at some original drafts from Madeleine L'Engle. And, you know, she would type it out and then make all her annotations, and then she would type the whole thing again and hand write all the corrections, and then type it again. Process has changed so much.

MISTY   Well, when I first sold my first manuscript to Betsy Wollheim, the first Arrows book, I had sent her the manuscript. C.J. Cherryh had sent me a letter of introduction with it. Marion Zimmer Bradley had sent a little note along — not with the manuscript, but about the fact that I was going to send it. And we met at — there used to be a con in the U.S. when there was no Worldcon in the U.S. I don't know if they're still doing that.

BEN   I don't know.

MISTY   NorthAmeriCon, I think it was called, for people who couldn't go to Worldcon. And this was the one held in Austin. And she invited me to dinner with her authors, which I thought was a good sign. And walking back from the dinner, she said, "Well, we really want to buy the manuscript, but it's going to need a lot of corrections." And I said to her, "Betsy, if you had said this when I was working on a typewriter, I would commit seppuku right here and now. But I'm working on a computer. Just, you know, bring it on."

BEN   So the whole writing career, it sounds like, is dependent on, "Okay, I have the computer. I can say yes."

MISTY   Yeah, it really was. Because I couldn't— first of all, the mental exhaustion brought on by just the thought of having to do all that, type it and retype it and retype it and retype it. No. And I didn't have time. I had a full time job — more than full time job, because they required us to do unpaid overtime.

BEN   Was this flight attendant?

MISTY   No, God, no, I was never a flight attendant. Jesus Christ, don't start that rumor again. I was a computer programmer for American Airlines.

BEN   Okay, got it.

MISTY   The French edition of my book says I was a flight attendant.

BEN   Okay, yeah, it's still out there. But no, you were programming computers. Never a flight attendant. Okay.

MISTY   I was a computer programmer. That's why I was stationed in Tulsa.

BEN   Got it. Amazing. Okay, so we have that correction on the record, I'm sure, for the 50th time.

MISTY   At least.

BEN   Getting back to Elvenbane, then. So you do the three books with Andre in 1991, 1995, and 2002. Did the process change from book to book? Or was it kind of always that — send the pages over and she'd annotate?

MISTY   By the time we got to the second book, she was a little more computer literate. I'm trying to think if we sent discs back and forth. I think I didn't. I did not send physical pages. I sent her a computer disc. But she printed it there and she wrote corrections on the manuscript and sent it back to me. But at least we weren't shipping physical pages back and forth. Oh, God, that reminds me of something that happened in the first book. I was still working for American Airlines. And we got heavily discounted FedEx. And I had sent the corrected galley proofs with handwritten corrections, because they weren't doing PDFs back then. So they sent me the galley proofs, I hand wrote the corrections, and I sent them the galley proofs back. And the box came apart somewhere in the shipping.

BEN   Oh, no.

MISTY   Yeah. And Jim Frenkel, the editor, called me up and told me this. And we both had simultaneous heart attacks, because that was the only copy. And this was why one of the pieces of advice I used to give people — and I still think it's valid, because things happen, and there is always a printed manuscript at some point in the process — I've told people who were asking me advice about writing, and specifically manuscript formatting: always put page number, title, and author on the top of every page. And the only reason they found all of the pages was because I had done that.

BEN   Wow. And we get the book.

MISTY   Yeah, yeah. And they did find them. They found all the pages.

BEN   And that was the first one?

MISTY   That was the first one, Elvenbane.

BEN   Yeah. So we would not be here if someone hadn't gone through and—

MISTY   Yeah. But they knew what to look for. Because we could tell them that, they knew exactly what to look for.

BEN   That's amazing. So I have to confess. So I grew up in the 80s and the 90s, kind of the age to pick up a lot of these books.

MISTY   Yes, my dear infant.

BEN   Right? I mean, I'm pushing 50 now. But I still feel like an infant compared to my revered elders. If you're listening to the podcast, Misty's giving me a real expression here. And my confession is, I grew up reading Andre Norton. And—

MISTY   As did I.

BEN   Yeah. And I think she's the first author I read where I went halfway through the book: "Oh, this isn't a fantasy book. This is post-apocalyptic." Hugely influential on how I think about genre and literature — that you can mislead people. And then the other, second part of the confession: the first book of yours that I read was Elvenbane.

MISTY   Oh, really? 

BEN   Oh really! I haven't told you that before. So I've been secretly nerding out about this particular series, and that the fourth book is coming, because I've been waiting ever since that — spoiler alert here — the moment with the portal at the end of the third book, to find out what happens, as have many, many other people. So we're going to get back to the third book, but I want to take a little time and let's talk about kind of building the world of Elvenbane. There's so much in here. I don't use this word very often, but this is hardcore.

MISTY   Yeah, it really is. Andre and I went real hard on this one. This was definitely meant to be an adult fantasy.

BEN   And you have two species that invaded this world of humans. One of them mostly benign, kept themselves hidden, but the other ones that came in and were full-on conquerors.

MISTY   Right.

BEN   And this is, of course, the evil colonizer elves.

MISTY   Elves. 

BEN   Right. So as you're building this world — I have 70 questions, we're never going to get to all of them — I'm curious how much of the politics of the world were part of the world building beforehand, and how much were a discovery as you were going along?

MISTY   Mostly, they were part of the world building beforehand, and we kind of based it on, I would say, medieval European politics, because of all of the individual— they're not exactly city-states, but they function like city-states. Italian city-states, specifically.

BEN   Which have been a huge influence on my writing, too. I love that era, and I think we could nerd out about it forever, because it's so interesting, especially traveling around Italy and saying, "Why'd they build all their cities on hills?" Oh. 

MISTY   (laughs) Yes, that would be why. 

BEN   Not convenient if you're just thinking about natural resources. Way more convenient if you're trying to navigate a political situation that can turn on a dime. Tell me about iron in the world.

MISTY   Well, now that we took from classical, mostly Celtic stuff. Cold iron is definitely very harmful to the fae of all kinds in Celtic mythology, and so we took that from Celtic mythology.

BEN   Okay. And then tell me about the alkali with the dragon claws.

MISTY   Oh, yeah. Well, the dragon claws are— there is some iron in the dragon claws. And we didn't want to use acid, so we used alkali instead, which I don't know how well that works with iron, but there you go. But "basically"—

BEN   It's a good pun.

MISTY   Yeah. And there is some iron in the dragon scales, as well.

BEN   Okay. So that helps kind of create— 

MISTY   It's a chitin with iron. So that means that dragons in their true form are very lethal to elves.

BEN   Yes. And part of what I love about the books is kind of the dragon chapters in Elvenbane feel very naturalist. We have the shed skins, the dietary metal salts, sandstorm survival, all these pieces, and then you combine it with the court politics of the elves. And I'm curious kind of how you managed in the writing process the contrast between those two.

MISTY   Well, it's two voices, really. And that was a deliberate choice. We chose one voice for the dragons and their culture and a second voice for the elves and their culture. Which in that case — in the case of the elves and their culture — the politics might be medieval Italian, but the culture is straight on Caligula.

BEN   Right. So it's not that, oh, one of you is writing the dragon pieces and one of you is writing the elf pieces. It sounds like it's more as experienced writers, here you are—

MISTY   That's exactly what we did.

BEN   —shaping the voice intentionally.

MISTY   That's exactly what we did.

BEN   And there's this other piece where you have — I have the section here — "From the Pelugian Chronicles of Laranz, Late Truth-Seeker of the Citadel." There's this lovely kind of extended section from inside a book, that where at the end you have Shana blink and close the cover of the book. "What on earth did they do," she asked the other volumes about her. "Pay this fellow by the word?" And then she turns it into a doorstop.

MISTY   Yes. Oh God, there is. I'm not sure if I should reveal this. No, I'm not going to. I will just say there was a book that was written with exceedingly purple prose that was very popular when we were writing Elvenbane. And Andre and I looked at each other when we were discussing it, and "What did they do, pay him by the word?" is exactly the phrase that we used.

BEN   So I will just say I had a particular book in mind when I read this, and I won't name it.

MISTY   Until the author dies, we can't do that. Because that would uncork a can of worms. We probably don't want to.

BEN   But, you know — just, it made an admirable doorstop. In fact, it might have been created just for that purpose.

MISTY  Yes.

BEN   Amazing. I'm so happy to have my wonderings about that validated.

MISTY   Yep.

BEN   So in these books, what would you say — kind of thinking about the DNA of them. What's yours? What's Andre's? Or can you even separate it? Like, what wouldn't be there if you had written it alone?

MISTY   I think I was mostly responsible for the dragon DNA. And Andre was mostly responsible for the human DNA. And the two of us with our knowledge of history came up with the elves.

BEN   Okay. Yeah, I remember reading this and just going— you've combined, taken— it's not that, oh, my goodness, you've taken from source X, Y or Z. But that I— because, for example, it was in D&D, Dark Sun was written after these books. But then I read Elvenbane after reading Dark Sun. Like, wow, this evokes the feeling of that harsh world and that harsh environment. And then, of course, of other famous series dealing with elves going through portals that we won't talk about today. But just kind of the cultural storytelling DNA that's woven into this and what you each brought to it. I just remember being so satisfying to me when I was straight out of college and angry about everything. And here is a world where there was such a strong sense of justice. And awareness of the injustice of that world. And I'm curious, because you've talked about the historical influences — did you find yourself writing with any sense of contemporary injustice?

MISTY   Oh, gosh, yes. Oh, gosh, yes. And it would be even worse if I were writing it today. Yeah, actually, Ben (Ohlander) and I did just that. Well, it was the fourth book.

BEN   Let's talk about the fourth book, because I want to— we'll jump around. We can do that. We're allowed.

MISTY   Yeah.

BEN   I remember there's a comment you made on the Discord server. Let's see if I can pull it up. "The fourth one with Ben (Ohlander) was different. We worked together in the same document at the same time online. Ben's style is a bit more violent than mine, this book is a bit harsher. I LIKE IT, but if the Elvenbane world is dystopian, well, the Elven Homeworld takes that to another level.”

MISTY   So it definitely does.

BEN   So tell me more.

MISTY   Ah, well, okay. We've known Ben. Well, Larry has known Ben for much longer. I think they were in high school together. I think they were even in junior high together, but I'm not sure. They were definitely in high school together and they played D&D with the Hobbit Cavaliers in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And I had him in a couple of my anthologies, but not the Valdemar anthologies. I've had him in the Elemental Masters anthologies, and he's had ambitions to write, and I knew that he could write well. So when we finally got the rights back from the person who was disputing them— I'm not sure if we want to go into that.

BEN   I don't know that it's necessary. I think—

MISTY   Yeah, I don't think it's necessary. 

BEN   We're finally at a point where we can get more Elvenbane. Hurray! 

MISTY   Yes, we finally got the rights back. I have all the rights to everything that Andre and I wrote together.

BEN   Oh, that's amazing.

MISTY   So when we got that back, I don't remember why Larry didn't want to do it, but Larry didn't want to co-write this one. And I was fishing around in my mind for somebody and Ben kind of naturally came up. Ben is a very interesting guy for an ex-Marine. We do let him come in the front door now. We used to make him come in the back so no one would know a Marine was coming into our house. But he is a political science major, I believe, in college. And he's very, very, very savvy about world politics and domestic politics, too. So I kind of had an idea of where I wanted it to go. But when I got hold of him — which was not hard, because we game every other week — I said, "Okay, here's the three books. Do you want to write the fourth one that's still under contract with me?" And when I explained the process that I was going to use — he was a little hesitant at taking on something as big as a book — when I explained the process we were going to use, which was working in the same document, me over his shoulder all the time, he felt a whole lot better about that idea. So when we started putting the outline together, it turned into something very, very, very dystopian. But also the world itself — he had a lot to do with making it as monstrous as it was. There's a lot of his ideas in there.

BEN   Okay. And this— we have not seen this world, we've only kind of seen— we've seen the trauma of this world reflected in the elves who are—

MISTY   No, Exactly. And you have to remember — well, spoiler alert — the elves who invaded this world were not coming as invaders. They were coming as refugees.

BEN   Right. 

MISTY  And it's a reflection of real world politics, in a way, that those who were traumatized in their old world are inflicting that trauma on their underlings in the new world. 

BEN  Now, and I think that we can see countless examples throughout history of—

MISTY   Yeah. And today.

BEN   And today.

MISTY   And today.

BEN   When you said dystopian, the word I was getting ready to offer was contemporary. But is there a difference?

MISTY   I don't think so. I mean, a writer is always a reflection of what is going on in their world. Either they're making a better world in their books as an example to what could be, or they're reflecting what is going on in the real world. But it's going to be in there one way or another. 

BEN   And it's always been that way. 

MISTY   Yeah, it always has been. 

BEN   If you look at the history of… Apocalyptic literature was very, very popular, like between 100 B.C. and 100 to 200 AD. And we look back and think, "Oh, wow, people were really thinking about the end times." No, this was a way to talk about real life, contemporary political situations.

MISTY   Exactly. 

BEN   Without getting in trouble with the authorities.

MISTY   Yeah. Revelations was very much a reflection of what the writer of that time really wanted to have inflicted on the people in power. 

BEN   Yeah. And so I think your point that every writer is reflecting their situation and what's going on — which brings— I want to jump back, because that brings up one of— we're going to get into some Elvenbane spoilers. But I think if people are listening, they've had since 1991.

MISTY   So you'd think.

BEN   You'd think.

MISTY   But hey, if you haven't, sorry, just to tune out. And maybe Ben can give you the spoiler tags so they can fast forward through the podcast.

BEN   Make a special podcast sound effect or something, with all the keyboards. 

MISTY   Ding! Spoiler!

[SPOILER WARNING]

BEN   I love the Prophecy of the Elvenbane. This notion of, oh, let's invent the idea of the chosen one as a prank. And the book leaves it a little bit open. Was it a prank all along, or was there some authorial intent there? Do you feel like the fact that she ends up fitting into that prophecy — Shana says it's pure coincidence. Would you agree? Or kind of how do you approach that whole kinda inversion of the chosen one trope?

MISTY   Well, the dragons are pranksters. They are Coyote. They are Raven. They are the ones that throw monkey wrenches into the works to see what happens. So they're the ones that indeed invented the Prophecy of the Elvenbane. But what I was getting at, what Andre was getting at, was that these prophecies have a tendency to become self-fulfilling.

BEN   Okay, 

MISTY   So it's kind of, if you create a gap, if you create a hole, something will come along to fill that hole.

BEN   Right. 

MISTY   Nature abhors a vacuum.

BEN   That's actually very similar to how I crowdfund. I create the idea of, "Wow, there's this amazing thing we could all do if only we worked all together. What if there were some way we could do this?" And then people are like, "Oh, my goodness, what if we crowdfunded this?" Welcome to the table. Thank you. That's a brilliant idea. Didn't occur to me. Let's do it.

MISTY   Sure. It didn't occur to you. You sly devil.

BEN   But it's creating the hole and the desire so that as a community, we can come up with the idea together. And when we have ownership over ideas, we're way more likely to want to do them.

MISTY   Yes.

BEN   So I love this idea of creating the hole, you know. 

MISTY   And I think— in some, if I recall correctly, some of the dragons were creating this prophecy just to see what would happen. Not just to mess with the elves' heads, but to see what would happen. 

BEN   It makes me think part of what we may be missing in contemporary society is more prophecy.

MISTY   Except that the prophets are always lunatics.

BEN   You know, we could create holes for the kinds of people who we need.

MISTY   Well, yeah.

BEN   Here's the narrative. Will someone please step into this? I want to change tracks a little bit. We've kind of talked about here's the hole that people step into. And then I think kind of a mirror side of that is the roles that people are forced into. Let's talk about the Change, where we're remaking a daughter or a wife into kind of perfect beauty, perfect compliance. Curious. There's obviously modern parallels to this, but I'm curious…

MISTY   Oh Absolutely.

BEN   …what your thoughts are about the Change and its role in these books.

MISTY   Well, I don't like to take a cause and beat you over the head with it. But I do like to— in all of my work, I do like to use parallels that are not necessarily obvious if you're looking at them from the outside, but are definitely parallels to what's going on in the real world. And make them as attractive or as distasteful as possible. So that maybe it can make somebody think.

BEN   Okay, so perhaps we leave it out at the Change at, "Oh, this is really dystopian and horrible. I wonder how this relates to some aspect of the real world," and what the audience think about themselves.

MISTY   Pretty much. Yeah.

BEN   Yeah. I'm here for it. And I don't doubt that we're going to have parallels like that in the fourth book.

MISTY   Oh, absolutely.

BEN   Given what I know about how aware you are of contemporary events, and given Ben's background with political affairs. I have the publisher— I do have the draft of it. I haven't read it. I'm trying to wait until everything is final, but I'm tempted every day, because I know that I'm just going to be cackling and rubbing my hands together.

MISTY   Oh, the manuscript is final.

BEN   Oh, it is final. Okay, great. Perfect. Well, I'm going to read it then.

MISTY   By all means.

BEN   Yeah. And also, just to take a little bit of a moment here. So we've gone through this whole process of finding a publisher for the fourth book.

MISTY   Yeah, that was because Tor decided that it had been so long since the first three books were published that they were just not going to launch this thing out into the air. And, you know, that's their privilege. If that's what their marketing said, fine. So we went shopping for a publisher, ended up with Shahid, who I've worked with — Arc Manor, who I've worked with before. Cody and I did Zombies, Werewolves and Vampires in Space. With him. And trust me, it's not as stupid as it sounds.

BEN   I love stupid sounding concepts. They bring me such joy.

MISTY   And it really is not as stupid as it sounds. And it's a combination of comedy and noir. Because we— as in, specifically noir detective.

BEN   Yes.

MISTY   So it's a lot of fun. And we've got plans to do some more. But he and I have another book that we need to finish first for Baen. But since we’ve worked with Shahid — I like him, I like his approach. And I'm very happy to have him have the four books.

BEN   Yeah. Well, and honestly, I can't say enough good things about him. I'm loving working with him.

MISTY   He's just a joy. 

BEN   Well, and so this particular interview isn't about doing a ton of promotion. But just to talk briefly about the upcoming campaign, because I think it's relevant. This is— we've done several deluxe volumes now. And Shahid and I got chatting, and you kind of went from "Hey, Ben, can you help me run a crowdfunding campaign?" to "Wow, I love what your team is creating with these deluxe books. Do you want to design it? Do you want to fulfill it? Do you want to—" And so we're in this place of we're doing a crowdfunding campaign in collaboration with the publisher, which is like— 

MISTY   It's different. 

BEN   I don't think most publishers would touch [crowdfunding like] this.

MISTY   No, it's so different. But he has a whole— he and Mike Resnick basically work together on a whole lot of stuff for Arc Manor. And Mike was very, very open to trying new things. And Shahid is evangelical about trying new things.

BEN   Yes. I think that's a great word for it.

MISTY   And yeah, he's just, like I said, he's a joy to work with. And I was— with the exception of one thing where he picked an editor that just was not right for what we were doing. And I said, "This is not working. She has her whole different idea for what this book is supposed to be. And it's not right." And he said, "Okay, fine, then I'll find another editor." How often does that happen? 

BEN   I mean, hopefully more often after you've written 142 books.

MISTY   Well, yeah, that's true.

BEN   There's a point at which the editors should say, "Okay, I can probably trust Misty's vision." You know, but what I'm enjoying about this is — I'm not going to name numbers, but, you know, I've friends and colleagues elsewhere who worked in the publishing industry and moved to crowdfunding, and who had access to the piddling sums that publishers spend on marketing individual titles.

MISTY   Oh, God, I mean, the only people that get good marketing are the ones that are already New York Times number one bestsellers. But everybody else just gets little trickles.

BEN   But what I'm loving about working with Shahid is I can come to him and we're running— I'm running the marketing. And it's all metrics driven. And I guarantee we've, for this little independent crowdfunder, we've spent more on marketing than most of the big publishers would have. And, you know, I won't reveal the numbers publicly for what we spend on marketing for Deluxe Heralds, but orders of magnitude larger than what the publishers would spend. But if you're approaching it, following the metrics and the return on ad spend and all these other pieces, what it has made clear to me is that not spending the money promoting the books is a choice. Because when we spend the money to reach people, it's so possible to get them to show up and to help drive the success harder. So being able to work with a publisher who understands that, who's willing to let me say, "I want to spend X thousand dollars before the campaign launches," and he says, "All right, as long as you're data driven, go ahead." Right. And who is so clearly passionate about the story and the content and the art and wants to make something beautiful. I'm just— I'm raving a little bit, but I'm having such a great experience.

MISTY   I said, yeah, Shahid is a joy.

BEN   Yeah. With the book that I have secretly been a fan of for over 25 years.

MISTY   Oh God, that's great. 

BEN   Yeah. I'm very pleased. All right. Let's talk about — I know time is even shorter, but I don't want to get out of this without talking about the Iron People.

MISTY   Oh God, I love the Iron People. They were mine. They were a hundred percent mine.

BEN   I've also noticed they're, I think, the only society in the trilogy that has a functional check on power.

MISTY   Yes, they are. Yes. They are kind of my Platonian ideal for how a society should work.

BEN   So a little bit of— so we have the wagon camps. We have the iron-smith theology. We have the war-bulls. We have Man-Hearted Women, which — oh my goodness — I love, as my gender bending, non-binary self. We have the Iron Priest, the War Chief, and the swing blocs. And I'm curious how you went about building your platonic ideal of a functional society.

MISTY   A little bit of this and a little bit of that. Basically, I took a lot of stuff from a lot of nomadic cultures. And in a lot of nomadic cultures, you do find more gender fluidity than you do in a stationary culture. And from there, I worked out how you would juggle power and successfully have a culture that has survived and thrived in this world where a race that is so powerful has taken over. Of course, the iron is integral to that. 

BEN   The iron is the counter to everything. So when it comes to kind of the theology of the iron, do you view that as having preceded the arrival of the elves, or incited by the arrival of the elves? I can see from your face, I'm challenging you.

MISTY   Yeah. And I'm not sure that I had anything in mind then. If we do more books, I'll probably do something with it.

BEN   Well, that's— do you feel like, oh, there could be more books?

MISTY   There could be more books. There could be more books.

BEN   Okay. 

MISTY   Because we leave it on another cliffhanger. 

BEN   I will cut this next section out of the interview if I need to. Do you resolve the cliffhanger from book three, or is this a double cliffhanger?

MISTY   We do resolve the cliffhanger from book three, in part.

BEN   Okay. Because I know many people have been going, "What was that?" And I'm guessing we're going to find out what it was.

MISTY   Oh boy. Are you ever!

BEN   Maybe I'll do that tonight, just so I can make everyone who's reading the interview jealous. I can be that petty.

MISTY   Go ahead.

BEN   All right. Part of what happens with each book in the trilogy is that where and how the protagonist appears and what happens to them kind of gets deferred a little bit. Elvenbane— the protagonist shifts, and it feels like a pattern. I'd love to hear about that.

MISTY   There is a pattern. What we're dealing with in the case of the humans is generational. Because the halfblood wizards will live much longer than the humans, and the elves will live much longer than the halfbloods. So we're dealing with something generational here. And so the protagonists kind of have to shift. And the conflict is of— I mean, it makes the Hundred Years' War look like, you know, the five day war. It's because that's how long it's taking. And it shifts even more in the fourth book. Because we're not in the new world anymore. We're back in the home world, the elf home world.

BEN   Yeah. So I guess that kind of fits into part of my next question as well, just kind of given these staggering—

MISTY   I can tell you where that kind of came from. In Andre Norton's Witch World books, the protagonists end up going to the aliens' home world. And I wanted to do something like that. Andre and I both wanted to do something like that. And this is, in part, it's a tribute to Andre.

BEN   That's amazing. Just the travel to the home world? Or do you feel that— 

MISTY   Oh, the fact that the book remains in the home world until the very end—

BEN   Okay. I love that. As a Witch World fan, that—

MISTY   You know what I'm talking about, when they go to the very dystopian science fiction-y world.

BEN   Yeah. 

MISTY   It's not quite a dystopian science fiction-y world. It is a dystopian world.

BEN   Right. But yeah. Oh, and I love my portal fantasies. In my own writing, I keep trying to do something else and I always end up with multiverses and portal fantasies. It's like this pleases something. So I'm so thrilled for where we're going. I want to hit on one more fourth thread here, just with the generational piece. And it's — I'm wondering how much intention there is about various human plot threads that disappear over time. Like there's a human resistance network in Elvenbane. We have Harden Sangral and the collar, he hands it to a contact called Marty who's writing a telos operation. And I'm wondering if stuff like that, where these pieces don't come back, is that just part of, "Wow, humans are like mayflies"?

MISTY   In part it's humans — humans are like mayflies, but I'm also going to do something with the persistence of ideas. 

BEN   So the particular people will come to an end because they just don't live that long. But it's this idea that the idea will persist.

MISTY   But the idea will persist.

BEN   Yeah. Well, and that gets back to what—

MISTY   And that is inspired by the book and series Connections.

BEN   Oh, I don't know this one.

MISTY   You don't?

BEN   I have not read Connections.

MISTY   Oh my God. You must discover Connections. It was an absolute revelation. It was a water cooler talk when I was working for [my] Associates as a computer programmer. Every single— we'd all watch Connections on Sunday night and then we'd all talk about it on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. And then Thursday it was, "I wonder what the next episode is going to be like."

BEN   I'm just looking this up. Oh, it's James Burke?

MISTY   James Burke.

BEN   Okay.

MISTY   Brilliant, brilliant man. And oh my God, that series was just amazing and still holds up today. Absolutely holds up today. If you want to just dive down a rabbit hole, I'm pretty sure it's all on YouTube. So just dive down that rabbit hole and don't come out. You'll come out going, "Oh my God, I never thought of that."

BEN   I love that so much. All the historical works that appeal the most to me are the ones that can take the various threads of ideas. 

MISTY   If this hadn't happened, then this wouldn't have happened. And if this didn't happen, then this wouldn't have happened. And if this hadn't happened, then this wouldn't have happened. 

BEN   It's like the conversation we had on the Discord server about Mount Tambora. And I know when you and I've talked about it, because I believe you worked that into Elemental Masters.

MISTY   I did. 

BEN   Yeah. Where without Tambora, we wouldn't have had the bicycle.

MISTY   Yeah. Because so many horses died.

BEN   So many horses died. From a volcano on the other side of the world.

MISTY   That nobody knew it erupted. Right. Just all they knew was that that was the year without a summer.

BEN   Right. We wouldn't have had Frankenstein.

MISTY   No. 

BEN   Because Mary Shelley wouldn't have been stuck by Lake Geneva trying to endure another tedious threesome. Yeah. And I think the Louisiana Purchase as well.

MISTY   Probably.

BEN   Yeah. So, okay. So for anyone reading the interview or listening to the podcast, go look for James Burke, Connections. 

MISTY   He also had a follow-up series, The Day the Universe Changed, which is just as good. 

BEN   And so he's kind of coming with this idea of the ideas that outlast the individuals, which sounds like you've worked into—

MISTY   Yeah. That’s exactly what we’ve worked into.

BEN   So if someone's doing a reread in preparation for the fourth book, or they're reading for the first time, this gives them some threads that they can tie onto to kind of see the craft and the decisions that are going into what's happening. That's very exciting. I know we are out of time. May I ask two more questions?

MISTY   Sure.

BEN   Okay. So, and this is just looking back at a book that was written in a different time, in a different context. How do you feel about their relevance to the modern world? I have my own thoughts, having especially looked at Elvenbane again. Are they dated, or do they have some of these lessons that move through time?

MISTY   I think that I would like to think they have lessons that move through time. I'd like to think they aren't dated. I mean, there might be some things that are dated.

BEN   Yeah. Well, there always are.

MISTY   Well, I think the editor that Shahid put on these has done a pretty good job of updating the stuff that's dated.

BEN   Okay. So can you tell me a little bit about that work that's been done?

MISTY   Oh, it's little, it's nitpicky little things. It's phrasing. It's not concept, but it's phrasing mostly. And I went through about the first three chapters and then I said, "Look, Shahid, you guys are doing exactly what I’d do. Just run with it."

BEN   Yeah. That's amazing.

MISTY   They're not changing anything that I would be unhappy about. And they're picking up things. She picked up a few things that I had missed. Because I'm an old fart.

BEN   I went to the Vancouver art museum recently. They have a big exhibit for a famous Northwest artist named Emily Carr. And I took a photo of this piece that stuck with me and that I think is quite relevant. To Carr— so she represented a lot of indigenous artwork and abandoned villages in her work. "To Carr and her white contemporaries in the art world, she was a progressive set against the widespread racism that devalued indigenous peoples and their art through explicit claims to European biological and cultural superiority." And then it goes on to talk about the context of the time in which she was writing, and that anyone who is a progressive in their time is eventually going to— the world will always continue to move and evolve. And I think there's such value in being able to look at our art and to look at those edits and to say, "Oh, if I knew then what I know now, here's how I would have done it."

MISTY   Exactly. Exactly.

BEN   Yeah. And it's not about devaluing the work. In my work— it's not about devaluing the work. It's about valuing the ideas that move through time.

MISTY   Yeah, there you go. Yeah. So it's updating the work.

BEN   Yeah. So, you know, that's a case where there will be people who are upset that any changes have been made. 

MISTY   But I honestly don't think anybody's going to notice them.

BEN   And that's what I was going to say. They're not going to notice.

MISTY   Which is the point. 

BEN   People would notice more if they hit the stumbling block and said, "Oh, wow— Yeah, this is dated and painful in a way that was progressive and intentional at the time." And just the language has changed.

MISTY   The language has changed. Yeah. So it's just little tiny tweaks. And it just makes it read that much more smoothly.

BEN   Yeah. When we're not getting tripped up by that. So as a purist, this makes a lot of sense, because again, it comes back to what are we trying to communicate? So as we wrap up a very long call — and thank you for your time.

MISTY   Hey, yeah.

BEN   I love doing this so much, because like James Burke, you're pulling on threads from everywhere that— like, oh, can I keep up? Can I keep up? I'm going to try. Do you have any final thoughts that are on your mind about the Halfblood Chronicles that you want people to carry with them as they prepare to rediscover them, or find them for the first time?

MISTY   Just enjoy them. Because if you enjoy something, you are subconsciously taking in the stuff that I'm— I'm hiding the medicine under the sugar. I don't want you to taste the medicine. I just want you to enjoy the sugar.

BEN   Well, sure, that's our job as artists and creators.

MISTY   Exactly. Yeah. And entertainment has got to come first.

BEN   And I think it's one of the pieces with AI that people don't think about. They just say, "Well, it's writing without a soul," or "it's just writing plot." But AI is just the sugar. It's missing—

MISTY   Exactly. Exactly.

BEN   It's missing the pieces underneath that. 

MISTY   It's either just the sugar or it's just the medicine.

BEN   Right. And we need both. And we need that human spark and those connections saying, "Oh, let's draw on something," because AI is such a machine for what is the most expected thing that we would get, as opposed to, let me make this leap of human intuition and brilliance that a machine never could make.

MISTY   Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

BEN   Which is where the joy of discovery comes from as we're reading. So I too hope that everyone reads these and has an incredible blast with this super hardcore world of evil elves. Again, I love it so much. It is such a privilege to get to talk about it with you. 

MISTY   And I'm all about redemption arcs. There's plenty of that too.

BEN   That's good. Have a great night. Thank you, Misty.

MISTY   You too. That was lots of fun, Ben.