This third book includes the entire novella - My Soul to Keep & Others - the origin story of Donovan DeChance. It also contains other novellas, These help create background and setting for Book IV - Kali's Tale, and the follow-on novel "Nevermore, A Novel of Love, Loss & Edgar Allan Poe" - but that is all in the introduction below. I'm going to put up the first two or three chapters here...I hope it will entice those of you reading along through my novel Heart of a Dragon and hopefully the next, Vintage Soul, to continue with me.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the magic of stories, and words, and the way they can take you places you never expected to be even if you are the one writing them down. This is not the first time, and will likely not be the last time, that something intended as no more than a flashback led me to something larger and grander. I also dedicate this to Crows, Ravens, the Old West, and my buddy Steven Savile, without whom there would not have been a town of Rookwood in which to set this.
Author's Introduction
When I set out to write the next novel in my series, The DeChance Chronicles, I started with the notion that I'd write a quick flashback where Donovan DeChance shared his origins with his lover and partner, Amethyst. I figured it would help me to define the character, and after they snapped back to the present, after about a chapter, I'd start Kali's Tale and move on.
One day I'll learn not to plan the beginnings of novels around flashbacks. When I started writing the story of how Donovan set out on his long, strange journey, and how he met Cleo, the Egyptian Mau that is his constant companion, I got drawn in. I found myself fascinated with the story, and as it sometimes happens, the words just flowed. I was three chapters into the flashback before I admitted to myself that it was a separate story altogether from Kali's Tale, and that it was never going to work as a simple flashback. What I had on my hands was a book, albeit a short one, and it was going to run its course no matter what I thought, or planned.
My Soul To Keep takes place in the fictional old west town of Rookwood, setting of the novel Hallowed Ground that I wrote with author Steven Savile. This story takes place many years before what Steve and I wrote, but fans will recognize some of the characters. I have very seldom been as happy with a story as I am with this one, and I'm proud that it's finding its way, at last, into print.
Another thing I've discovered as my career progresses is that all of my stories blend. I have a number of fictional settings that I make use of, Random, Illinois, San Valencez California, Friendly California, and Old Mill, North Carolina. All of these are loosely based on places I've lived, and most of my novels and stories over the years have touched on them, taken place within their borders, or connected to them in one way or another.
The novel Kali's Tale happened when I was finished with My Soul to Keep. In that novel, I take Donovan and all his team into the world of Old Mill, North Carolina, on the border of the Great Dismal Swamp. He meets one of my favorite characters there, Cletus J. Diggs, and so that people will have the whole picture before moving on to Kali's Tale, I have included the first Cletus J. Diggs novella here, The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of Nature. It's important to me that the references are clear, and I dearly love this character, and the story.
Also included in this volume is a novella titled The Preacher's Marsh. It's an excerpt from a novel, Gideon's Curse, which I have still got to finish edits on. In Kali's Tale, Donovan and company visit the main site of Gideon's Curse, the Pope Plantation outside Old Mill. The Preacher's Marsh is the very beginning of that novel, a tale of post-Civil War North Carolina, swamp magic, the north – the south. It's a dark, powerful story that I'm very proud to have written, and it helps build on the setting of Old Mill, North Carolina. All of it is important, and as I've discovered, all of it seems to be one big story. I guess that's how it really works. All of us have a story in us…the hardest thing is finding the connections that bridge the chapters, the bindings that link the characters, and the magic that shapes the worlds.
The characters from the Cletus J. Diggs novella also appear, and have major roles, in my novel Nevermore, A Tale of Love, Loss, and Edgar Allan Poe. As does Donovan. I love history, and I love The Great Dismal Swamp. I hope after you've read my stories, you'll come to love them too.
David Niall Wilson
January, 2013
