This story started when George R. R. Martin leaned over at a book signing the two of us were doing and said, “Hey, do you do short fiction?”

I told him I did long short fiction. He then invited me into one of his anthologies—which was a true honor. The anthologies he and Gardner Dozois do are kind of a “who’s who” of speculative fiction writers, and though George is famous for his novels these days, he’s always been known in the industry for his editorial skills. (Gardner, by the way, is equally famous—so it’s a real privilege to get an invitation from them.)

I thought a long time about the nature of an anthology called Dangerous Women. I worried that stories submitted to it might fall into the trope of making women dangerous all in the same way. (This turned out to not be the case, fortunately.) I didn’t want to write just another clichéd story about a femme fatale, or a woman soldier who was basically a man with breasts.

What other ways could someone be dangerous? I knew early on that I wanted my protagonist to be a middle-aged mother. Threnody was a fully built world already, as I knew it was important to the Cosmere. I toyed with setting the story there, and the final piece came when I was doing genealogy for religious purposes and ran across a woman named Silence.

Who would name their daughter Silence? It seemed one of those beautifully Puritan names that wouldn’t fly in most settings—but it was perfect for Threnody. (Someday, someone will pull out of us what Nazh’s real name is.) The story grew from there.

A few cool notes about this story. First, the rules for how to deal with the ghosts are (vaguely) based on Jewish laws of what you can and can’t do on the Sabbath. Isaac, our tireless cartographer, named the planet Threnody (he named Nazh as well). The frame story with the men in Silence’s inn was nearly cut two or three times—even Gardner was skeptical about it when he started reading. In the end, it proved worth its space because of the punch it gives transitioning into Silence’s viewpoint, and because of the nice way it wraps up the story at the end. I think it’s necessary, but it also means the story starts with what I consider a weaker section.

You’ll see more of this world in the future, most likely.

The Drominad System

THE
DROMINAD
SYSTEM

THE DROMINAD SYSTEM

THERE are many planets in the cosmere that are inhabited, but upon which no Shards currently reside. Though the lives, passions, and beliefs of the people are, of course, important regardless of which planet they reside on, only a few of these planets have relevance to the greater cosmere at large.