YA Fantasy
Date Published: August 15, 2014
Three nations teeter on the brink of war, and caught in the middle, a brother and sister find themselves surrounded by dangers they never imagined.
Adopted by the Yurha, Toby still struggles to properly fit in. Hunting in the forest, he stumbles across a jeweled cuff that attaches to his wrist and won’t come off. Afraid at first, he is soon thrilled to discover the cuff carries powerful magic. But as he tries to control it, he realizes the cuff is still linked to its original owner - an owner who will go to cruel lengths to get his magic back.
Miles away, Toby’s twin sister Ora struggles with life in a strange city. She and family have fled Yois for Nietza, where Ora will not be arrested for possessing magic. However, Nietza is not the magical paradise Ora had imagined. Despite her new friends, she can’t feel safe in a country where women are little more than pawns.
Secrets, brutal murders and war edging ever closer drive both siblings from their safe places. Failure to stop those who pursue them will mean a fate worse than death.
Interview
Is there a message in
your novel that you want readers to grasp?
The Threads of Magic series for me has always been about the
nature of cultural ties, and the alliances and betrayals of war. Toby and Ora both get caught up in events
related to the rising tension in their respective countries. The message for me was always to protect your
loved ones, and do what needed to be done to survive.
Is there anything you
find particularly challenging in your writing?
First drafts are always the most challenging for me. I have a much more organized method for
revising and developing a second draft, but the first draft is just about
getting the entire story down on paper.
My daily goal is 1000 words, and it’s often difficult to achieve.
How many books have
you written and which is your favorite?
I written three first drafts, Shadow and Wings being the
first and third. The other one is
actually my favorite, an urban fantasy novel called Blood Poison. It’s a very different setting and style from
the Threads universe, and I enjoy playing around with the world elements and
the characters. I have no immediate
plans to publish it, but short stories set in the same world my pop up on my
website in the future.
If you had the chance
to cast your main character from Hollywood today, who would you pick and why?
I have a terrible time with this sort of thing, 1) because I
don’t know enough about current Hollywood actors to know who to pick from and
2) because it feels very odd and presumptious of me to assign an actor to a
role in one of my novels. In the wildly
unlikely chance that Threads was ever turned into a movie, with Toby being so
young, I would imagine he’d end up being played by a relatively unknown
actor.
When did you begin
writing?
I began actively writing when I was 15. My first attempt at a novel was a YA urban
fantasy series about a family of witches.
I never got too far with that, but I kept writing, and at 19 took my
first fiction writing class. I was
hooked from then on and started to take my writing seriously.
How long did it take
to complete your first book?
My first novel was Shadow of the Wolf, and it took me nearly
2 years to finish, from first draft to final revision.
Did you have an
author who inspired you to become a writer?
I’ve always been an avid reader, and enjoy too many
different authors to be able to pinpoint any one of them as the one that
inspired me to write.
What is your favorite
part of the writing process?
Revision, because that’s when my messy first draft coalesces
into a fully realized story. It’s always
difficult for me to believe when reading one of my first drafts that it will
actually become something cohesive and readable. My revision method makes the process a lot of
fun, discovering the strong points of the novel, and making them stronger.
Describe your latest
book in 4 words?
Can you share a
little bit about your current work and what is in the future for your writing?
I’m working on Threads of Magic book 3, Cry of the
Hawk. It picks up shortly after Wings
leaves off, so I can’t say much there.
Once I finish the Threads series, which will have four books, I plan to
move on to another world I’ve been building for the past six months, and that
I’m dying to write in. You can see
behind the scenes on my website in the articles section, under the tab Meran.
It’s sort of urban fantasy inspired, but the world definitely has some
quirks.
S. M. Pace
S. M. Pace lives with her husband in the wilds of Virginia, along with a pond full of fish, a turtle and too many squirrels. When she's not writing, she's wrangling a dozen pre-schoolers, learning a new recipe or reading.
Twitter: @StephMPace
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